The Steel Mill: Part II

Instrumentation: How exactly can you wreak your own unholy brand of havoc?

In order to thrive as a soul-shatteringly offensive death metal band, you must be sure to brandish brutality against your listeners’ sensibilities on several fronts. That wussy folk layout with one guitarist/vocalist will do nothing more than broadcast your inadequacy as a man in a death metal band. Most of the great bands of old went with what’s called “standard 5-front instrumentation” in the death metal world. This means that bands like Slayer, Decapitated, Deicide, Cannibal Corpse, Obituary and Exodus obliterated their audiences on five fronts—two guitars, one vocalist, one drummer and one bass player. The truly great thing about this layout is that many of these bands’ songs only included one guitar part. This means that the second guitarist’s sole mission was “add volume.” That’s brutal.

The modern day has brought with it another relatively common band format—the 6-front melodic instrumentation. Bands who use this format—Children of Bodom and Strapping Young Lad, to name two—add a keyboardist to the 5-front format. A malevolent tool as versatile as a keyboard can do anything with settings from those which can sonically stomp out the listener’s colon to the dirge-like organ settings which can summon the Anti-Christ, himself.

Let’s Get Specific: Can we get a bit more exact?

Because The Steel Mill churns out only the highest quality metal, I’ll assume that you, unlike many unfortunate death metal startups, aren’t chained to those talentless hacks you’ve been calling “friends” for the past eight years. All too often a visionary in spiritual brutality finds himself morally forced into a pact with the finest insults to musicianship super stardom can find because they’re his “friends.” After all, they like death metal, so they can certainly play death metal. And who are you to deny them their two-day-old dream just as it falls into their laps simply because you don’t think they’re “talented enough,” or because all five of them play guitar and you need a drummer and bass player? Yeah—you’d be a real jerk to leave your friends out of your creative vision.

Sarcasm aside, I’m going back to my assumption that you’ll be enjoying complete control over your bandmate selection. You’re going to want to go with the standard 5 setup. This way, you won’t have a pesky showboat of a keyboardist trampling your vision with some tacky “melody” or “soloing.” Women hate that stuff, and let’s not forget why we’re in this business. Speaking of things women hate has brought me to this crucial point regarding the standard 5 setup: you’d better not be planning on using your second guitarist unless you know exactly how to use him. Just as they hate melody, women absolutely can’t stand any kind of harmony—especially the kind between two guitars. If you really need to write a second guitar part, make sure you make liberal use of the tritone while the first part plays low power chords. For those of my readers who are unfamiliar with the tritone and, therefore, shouldn’t waste the world’s time with the drivel they plan to release with their death metal band, the tritone exists between the fourth and fifth degrees of both the major and minor scales. The tritone is historically linked to Satanism. In fact, in the dark ages, the tone was banned from music entirely because it was believed to summon the Devil, himself. It’s the most evil, sinister, disrespectful tone you can use in your songwriting, so you absolutely must use it whenever you write any second guitar parts. And first guitar parts. And drum parts.