Play Death Metal Guitar
To the untrained ear, playing death metal guitar sounds like a bunch of noise over drums. For an enthusiastic guitarist, the complexity, technical wonder, speed, and precision is a challenge awaiting to be conquered.
Steps
- Learn basic guitar skills. Power chords, hammer-ons and pull-offs, harmonics, and other basic skills are needed to play any genre of music, not just death metal.
- Listen to some death metal. Google "death metal bands" and see what you come up with. Some of the best bands to learn from are Obituary, Death, Morbid angel, Necrophagist, but these bands have highly technical guitar parts that might take years to get down tight.
- Find a "slower" song to learn at first. Before you run off buying equipment to play, try learning a song or two. A good place to start is Cannibal Corpse's "Infinite Misery."
- Examine the options of death metal you have. There's technical death metal, which is more complex. Melodic death metal includes more melody then an all out assault of sound.
- Get equipment for the job. A good distortion pedal is necessary, and an overdrive pedal is good too. Make sure your amp sounds good with death metal. You don't need an entire stack, but waging a metal war on a little 8-watt practice amp is a bad idea.
- Adjust your guitar, amp, and effects settings. Boost your guitar signal into amp with overdrive pedal. Set the level to max and distortion to min. Amp EQ settings should accent the highs and diminish the middle a bit. Most death metal uses de-tuned (and sometimes 7-string) guitars, so adjust accordingly.
- Find someone to practice with. Ideally, this should be another guitar or bass guitar player. Death metal drumming is hard to keep up with at a beginner level.
- Practice about an hour a day. If your joints start to hurt or your fingers bleed, take a break.
Tips
- Biggest mistake in Death Metal is to play sloppy and hide behind loud drums or distortion etc. The belief of "faster is better" is NOT true. Make sure you're a tight and accurate player and don't try to take shortcuts. The more time you put in to practicing, the better you will get.
- Having an individual style is much more important than being able to play fast or sweep pick, death metal is an experimental style don't fall into the trap of playing and writing formulated speed riffs with "brutal" break downs and "sick" sweeps, try to bring something different to the table.
- People say death metal takes no skill to play; they're wrong.
- decide what kind of death metal you want to play (this applies to all instruments). If you like melodic death metal, you'll have to learn the min-pentatonic scale, guitar harmonies, diminished scale, harmonic minor scale sweeping, tapping, and some hard rock/melodic British heavy metal. The drums aren't as hard as some other extreme metal styles, blast beats are usually slowed down or not used, but a drummer will need a bassy sound, a great sense of rhythm, and be good art drum fills. The bass isn't required to do much other than follow the rhythm guitar. The vocalist will need to sound black metal. Keyboards are an option, but they usually only play singular notes and just add atmosphere.
- Don't expect to join At The Gates or Decide the day you start, the riffs, speeds, and scales will take time to learn.
- Bragging will just frustrate everyone and irritate your band mates.
- With technical death metal,the bassist needs to be able to write and play fast paced complex bass lines that don't just play along to the rhythm guitar. The most common arpeggio/scale used in tech death metal for the guitar is the diminished. The drum usually plays singular slightly offbeat blast beats. Some notes in a few riffs can be atonal harmonics. In brutal death metal it's almost the same except the diminished isn't used as often,most songs are in c or d minor, blast beats are not singular and double bass is more frequent, the minor pentatonic scale shows up a little more in solos, though many solos can be atonal.
- Don't cover up your inability to play by only playing along with death metal CD's on full volume, practice unplugged from time to time or with a clean setting to make sure that your technique is perfect and not just a load of noise with distortion.
Warnings
- Never go insane with special equipment and tunings until you get the feel of how to play in the style of death metal. The only thing a beginner death metal guitarist should start with is a good distortion pedal. Starting off tuned to obscure guitar tunings like drop A# or buying a brand new B.C. Rich Beast will get you nowhere in terms of skill. Play the guitar you have, get a feel for what you're doing before you buy something you might look or sound silly with later when you go back to your normal-people-music band.
Things You'll Need
- A guitar -Ibanez, E.S.P, Schecter and Jackson are just a few good makes.
- Plectrum(Thicker plectrums allow for more aggression and speed, smaller plectrums allow more control),
- Amplifier- Marshall, Mesa Boogie, ENGL, a guitar manufacturing company are some of the good makes.
- Leads (get a spare also if your going to play live.)
- Overdrive Pedal used as boost (e.g Ibanez tube screamer).
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