Mix metal guitars like Metallica's Black Album (Extensive Guide)

To apply this guide, you don't necessarily need their expensive equipment. You don't need Mesa Boogie amps. You can use your Peavey or Marshall, or any good metal amp. Heck, I even used a digitech RP 500 and got good results with this. It's a pedal processor.

In fact, that's the beauty of this guide. We'll take your decent-average metal tone, coupled with their techniques, and perhaps get a top studio quality out of your tone. Well, at least you'll learn something. I already suppose you have a good palm muting technique, and you play tight enough. If not, that makes a subject for a future blog post, haha. ;)

1. Dialing the tone.

Ok, let's talk about how they dial their amp. You don't need to do it like them. High mids, low mids, middle mids.. doesn't matter. You could even get the same amp and cab they have, dial it the same, and guess what. IT WILL SOUND DIFFERENT. The tubes on your amp, will react differently than theirs made 26 years ago. The room is different. The amp itself might be fabricated differently than it was a quarter century ago.

Not to mention that they changed the settings per song, so there isn't a one and only setting. The badass tone is more likely a result from the techniques explained in part 2, 3, 4 and 5.

You can keep the dial settings you like the most, you can find your own sweet spot on your amp, better than anyone on the internet can.

With that in mind, use their dial settings just as a starting guide, and nothing more:
(from 1 to 10)
Gain: 9
Bass: 8
Middle: 1
Treble: 6
Reverb: 0 (where talking rhythm tone here. kill it)

Amplifier: Mesa Boogie Mark IV
Cabinet: Marshall Celestion
Mics: SM57 and MD421

Mic Placement: I suppose the SM57 was on cap edge, on-axis, and MD421 was on the cone edge at a 30-45 degree angle. I suppose again that the SM57 is mixed a bit louder than the MD. This is from what I could see in the documentary, coupled with my experiments.




Mids 1?!? See what I'm saying? Your amp is probably crapping out with that mid = 1, whereas James' amp may have a lot of mids naturally which sound way better scooped. His amp's gain is the equivalent of most modern amps' gain at 6 or 7. Turning your hipster dubstep-age amp at 9 is a sure way to kill the dynamics.

Try this instead:
Gain: 6-7
Bass: 6
Middle 3.5
Treble: 5.5
Reverb: 0
Presence: 2

This already sounds better on most metal amps while still retaining the characteristics you hear on the Black Album.

The band generally used EMG 81 (bridge) and EMG 85 (neck), these are active pickups, they require a 9v battery to run; they tend to compress the timbre. If you have passive high-output humbucker pickups, you're not really disadvantaged because they usually sound punchier and less dirty.

Even though it's not part of their setup, I would go as far as trying a distortion pedal TS808 in front of the amp. It can also be used to compensate for your lack of active pickups:

• 30-45% gain, 
• 85% tone, 
• adjust volume to sound good on amp. 

Here's a cool and free VST that simulates a TS808:  http://www.tseaudio.com/software/tse808



Here's the deal: Don't take anything above for granted. All these settings need to be adjusted to YOUR amp. You have to make those palm mutes and power chords sound good. Find the sweet spot.



Pro Tip: A noise gate will help enormously. It doesn't just kill the background noise, but also makes the dynamics stand out a bit more. I mean, you could have an acceptable background noise, that doesn't bother you at all; but once you put that noise gate on, it makes your amp sound from average to pretty damn good.

Über Pro Tip: Get a decent USB interface, like Focusrite Scarlett Solo, or something similar. "Line in" on the motherboard or a cheap chinese interface will never do the job. Not quality wise at least. You'll thank me later.

Otherworldly tip: Some amp VSTs (like BiasFX, or TSE x50 v2) have something called eq matching. You don't have to run the amplifying part of the VST... I mean you could use a real amp, and use only that eq match from BiasFX to get closer to the black album tone. What you will need tho, are the original separated guitar tracks from the Black Album, to use them as a source. You can download them here: http://multitrackdownloads.blogspot.ro/2012/03/guitar-hero-metallica-multitracks.html
*you have to download all parts, which include multitracks from a wide range of Metallica albums, but I guess you won't mind. 😜

2. Mixing Guitars

Now that where done with dialing, let's get to the serious business.

According to Flemming, they used 4 rhythm guitars + 2 for thumps. According to James in a later documentary, they used 6 guitars on the Black Album. 3 on each side. Flemming was not part of the Black Album, but I strongly believe they went for a similar setup. Yes, that's 6 separate recorded rhythm guitars. Holy sh*tttt.


Therefore, you'll need...

Side guitars = 2 guitars panned Left - Right 100%. at 0db;
Center guitars = 2 guitars panned L-R 80% at -3db;
Thump guitars = 2 accentuation guitars L-R 100% at -6db. (see ***. Very important.)

*If you try the double mic technique described earlier, you'll end up with a whooping 12 tracks.
**By "minus some db" I mean, if you choose to keep your sides at -5db, centers will be -8db. And so on.
***Metallica chose to make a layer of guitars that plays only low E's, or whatever root note is necessary. From my experiments, this works well with just a palm muted power chord at the beginning of segments (intro, verse, bridge, chorus, etc). The whole point of this thump layer is to accentuate the other rhythm guitars. It glues everything.


I've read on a forum that they blended Mesa Boogie Mark IV, and Mark IIC+ on the recording, and experimented with amps laying around the studio. So feel free to try different amps for different layers.


Pretty Basic Mixing Tip: Add a high pass at 80Hz, and a low pass at 8KHz to each guitar track. These are just starting points, obviously. Adjust them to your material. Even though this makes the guitars sound more thinner themselves, in this way, the kick, bass, cymbals, etc, will be much cleaner and more powerful in those frequencies. In other words, don't worry about guitars being thinner, just look for the whole mix to sound better.

3. Ok, nice setup, what about the bass?

First of all they used a SansAmp Bass Driver DI pedal in front of the bass amp. Here's a must-have VST simulation of that (awesome and free. Ain't life beautiful?): http://www.tseaudio.com/software/tseBOD

Here's a forum thread which might help you a little with the bass tone: http://www.guitarampmodeling.com/viewtopic.php?t=20655

Like for the guitars, you can use eq matching for bass.

If you take a listen to the isolated bass track on "Sad But True" *surprise surprise* you'll hear 2 bass tracks actually. A clean amplified one that plays all the parts and a distorted one, which plays only 0's or other root notes. The same philosophy as the thump guitars described above. The whole idea is to reinforce the tracks. (Did you know the thump bass on this song was played by Hetfield? :D )

Tip: If that distorted track is too dirty for you, take an eq and use the low pass and high pass to filter pretty much everything with the exception of mids (like a bell curve around 600hz). Basically you'll hear only distorted mids, which are way cleaner, and more focused for the whole mix).

The clean bass track deserves a high pass at 40hz, and low pass at 10Khz as a starting point. Notice that high pass is one octave below the high pass for guitars.

4. Tight recording techniques

Comping = Record each riff with many takes (on different tracks). As many takes as you need. Then take the best parts and assemble them into one Frankenstein track.

Pinch the track = delete the bad notes, record over them.

Adjust the timing of the track (cut and move where necessary), so that it synchronizes perfectly.

They used these techniques everywhere, on all instruments, including vocals, for each phrase. At the time they had no Pro Tools so they had to do it on tape. Which means cutting the tape and sticking it back. They had 2 guys in the studio to do this tedious job. To quote Hetfield: "We used Pro Tools techniques before there was any Pro Tools".

Now you have awesome DAWs like Pro Tools, Cubase, Ableton. You have no excuse. Learn to use them.

I don't care if you consider these cheating, not TRVE, overproduced, yada-yada. I'm just presenting the techniques they used. It's a form of art to get it quite right, and a lot of work.
I should also mention that if you don't play tight at all, there's no studio technique in the world that will save you.

5. Volume automation

They did it with console volume faders on all instruments. Speaking nowadays, I suggest doing this with midi faders, and not just dragging midi points with the mouse. It's one of the last things you want to do in the mixing process (eqs, compressors and other effects should be set up by now)

Assign your fader to a group of instruments (all rhythm guitars, all bass tracks, drums, vocals) and play the whole track while you automate. If you skrew up somewhere (happens every time), overdub the automation on that part.

It's a good idea to rise the guitar volumes 1db for 1-2 seconds at the beginning of each section (verse, chorus, etc). Together with the thump guitars described above, this makes a massive movement you couldn't otherwise achieve.

Obviously you can use volume automation for a lot of functional things. e.g. If you don't hear a solo clearly, don't add volume to it; instead drop the volume on rhythm guitars on that section only.

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Sources:

• Flemming Rasmussen, engineer of Metallica's 2nd, 3rd and 4th album. He was kind enough to explain their setup on the gearslutz.com forum.
• "A year and a half in the life of Metallica". A documentary on recording the top selling metal album of all time. The Black Album.
• https://shredaddict.com/metallica-amp-settings/