1. if time on this board will show anyone who has been around long enough....a thread can start out on one topic and end up on another real quick. this might end up becoming a britney spears is a great mother and social worker thread one day.

2. you could have gotten all that from their borefest of a documentary some kind of fecal matter. no one expected them to remain in their alchoholica stage forever 'they wouldnt have lived very long if they did' but they made a concerted effort to dumb down what they were doing to get the exposure and benjamins. like herbie hancock has been doing for close to 30-years now. see now this thread has gotten a bit jazzy.




3. i think what the grasshoppa was really getting at....is that metal has become even more cookie cutter in nature....tuning is just one aspect of that.

Just to be different, I'm going to start up-tuning. Like, how about low-G#? Then all my strings will break.

1 - well aware of it, just getting my metallica comment in while it's still semi-relevant hehe

2 - it's easier to read 3-4 pages at a time than it is to sit for 3 hours of watching lars' mouth. hehehe

3 - the cookie cutter thing happens to every style though. at least tuning is still relevant to the sound being produced unlike the style of clothing being worn (see, now the thread might be hip hop or it might be punk )

It was supposed to get to Metallica in the second paragraph instead of the third, but I got all emo on everyone and fucked it all up

I'm working it out, okay? Leave me alone


I'm not, per se (look at my custom title ). I love the low end, espeically so being a bassist and especially being a huge Ozzy-era Sabbath fan. I would blame the downturn in metal since the mid-80's on a number of other factors, with drop-D and lower tuning basically going along for the ride. Satchmo actually says in better and more succintly than I do. Tuning down was used by so many bands as a substitute for making good heavy music, and still is. The ear gets tricked into thinking something is heavier than it is, and bands can easily exploit this with half-assed riffage, more easily, in my opinion, than they can in standard tuning. Think of nu-metal. And now think of how much worse it would sound in standard E.

It does get a little extreme. The new In Flames, to me, is a tough listen in low B-flat. Part of the problem is it hurts the ears and makes me vomit. The other part is well, the songwriting isn't very good in my opinion. They've become a shadow of themselves, going from possibly downtuning's biggest pro (certificable masters of capturing the melodic aspects of low C)to yet another one of its cons. Tuning down is not evil or the death of music; it is just a tool. It has, no question, been in the hands of far too many incompetent bands for too long, but it of and by itself is actually a net addition to the metal arsenal. Tool, Soundgarden, Death, many grunge bands and certainly a good amount of metal bands have more than done it justice and proven its value.

All this said, there is something about playing in Standard tuning that seems to snap everything in the world back into place. Metallica is unquestionably trying to find something that is lost forever, and I don't think anyone will argue against it (except for the 10 people here that liked the Black Album) but I'll bet when they tightened those strings back up and played that open E chord, that they felt it too. Can they find in a simple guitar tuning what they lost somewhere along the path of terrible ballads and slack strings, makeup and bad haircuts? Do they all of a sudden remember what it was all supposed to be about, irrespective to the more literal question of can they ever get back to that point? I respectfully suggest that going back to Standard tuning may have more of an impact than you think



I use the Winamp plugin Pacemaker to transpose stuff all the time. Sometimes I take Iron Maiden and transpose it down and/or speed it up, other times I take In Flames and transpose it upward. If you use Winamp and would like to try it, here is the site:

http://www.surina.net/pacemaker/

Once installed, you can transpose pitch independently of tempo. In the case of TJR, just go up to +4 pitch. I use it for almost anything I would like to hear in an alternate key. You'll lose a little qualty as well, but I still think it is a solid tool.

yeah i hear ya seerix hehe i wasn't taking a dig at you in my first comment either. as for your first paragraph, it totally reminds me of comments that J yuenger (white zombie's guitarist) made around the recording of their last album. even in '95 he was cognitive of the negative possibilities downtuning offered. they did drop to C for 'more human than human' and used dropped-D on others but like he said, going to dropped-D made it too easy for something to sound heavy without actually being heavy.

the thing with metallica at this point is that i don't think it will matter what they do, they're going to get shit on from one direction or another. while tuning back up to E might get their guitars to start sounding like machine guns again i'm not exactly sold on the idea that it's going to make everything (or even anything) better. as far as i can tell the influence metallica had on metal was in their first 4 albums, they didn't influence anyone to change their tuning. going back might remind people of the old days but their influence will still be those classic albums from the 80s

the only way the detuning will be reversed is if Metallica, or any other band has a record which explodes in terms of sales....to the point it hits the public consciousness. All the cookie cutter labels, producers, a&r, and musicians/bands will take notice.


nirvana and pearl jam exploded and people were pitching tent in seattle signing anyone who was even standing in a music store and wearing a plaid flannel shirt. if they actually owned an instrument they were in the studio the next day. hell, even neil young was acting like was really from seattle.

I'd actually like to see what Yuenger said about that. I am going to get Googling!

In the meantime I am with Roivas. One of my basses is actually tuned up...the 4-string with the low-B E A D tuning is actually tuned up a whole-step to C# so I can play Venom songs

by the way, this thread shows that this place can still bust off a discussion which takes actual working neurons.


good going, grasshoppas.

Yeah it's nice to get into a really good solid discussion about my favorite subject. This is why I still wander over here. Well of course, it seems that everyone I can't tolerate isn't posting lately

it was in a guitar world interview if i remember correctly, with him and the bass player. good luck with that. i also kept buying the magazines solely for his column until he ran out of stuff to say.