Metal Guitar Techniques as Timbre, Form, and Speed
Calder Hannan · 2025
Guitar techniques are foundational to metal because of the ways they implicate timbre, form, and rhythm. Academic work on metal has tended to bracket out instrumental techniques when discussing musical structure. The chapter draws on the author’s own experiences as a metal guitarist alongside analysis and research in music cognition to show that guitar techniques are integral to metal composition and inseparable from the genre’s central aesthetic concerns. The chapter begins with an overview of the guitar techniques that are essential—and practically unique—to metal. This overview doubles as an exploration of the ways that technique has a reciprocal relationship with timbre, in that guitar distortion makes many of these techniques possible, and techniques in turn give access to novel timbres. Second, an analysis of Origin’s “The Aftermath” shows that techniques are compositionally generative and demonstrates how examining the ways they combine into “technique molecules” can lead to novel insights about form. Third, an analysis of Spawn of Possession’s “Scorched” is used to deconstruct the idea of speed in metal. Techniques contribute both to objective speed, by allowing guitarists to play notes more ergonomically and therefore more quickly, as well as to subjective speed—how fast the music feels.