You’ll remember cheeky Brit Pete Cottrell from his MeSugar video in which he covered Meshuggah using only sugary snacks and drinks. I remember it because it was so popular it crashed our website.
Today this musical mad scientist is back, and his hypothesis is that tuning your guitar UP rather than down can still sound heavy. Does his experiment confirm his hypothesis? Click the video below to find out.
Person with a guitar / March 14, 2016 12:22 pm
If you are relying on tuning down to be heavy then you may want to think a little harder about what you are writing.
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Ryan Levitation / March 14, 2016 5:43 pm
I was gonna say “just use a capo, then you don’t risk breaking strings,” but then he wouldn’t be able to get those super high notes way up the neck during the solo. I knew I watched that before commenting for a reason.
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NiKo Taperli Zed / March 16, 2016 10:03 am
And, honestly, it would have been less fun :)
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Charlie Hernandez / March 15, 2016 12:30 am
its the drum that makes metal heavy metal not the tuning of guitar just saying
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Anthony BlackFoot Martino / March 20, 2016 3:44 am
it’s the drums and the style of the riffs, tuning really doesn’t matter. it’s how it’s but together note by note and the techniques through which it is executed
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Markus Banda / March 17, 2016 5:49 pm
I disagree. It does NOT sound heavy at all. On an analogous comparison, just because a song has a heavily distorted guitar and fast aggressive drums doesn’t mean it sounds heavy. This makes the song sound very upbeat… which is nice for melodic parts, but at some point you just long to hear a low Em chord on a downtuned guitar to really project heaviness and really make some heads want to headbang.
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Anthony BlackFoot Martino / March 20, 2016 3:43 am
sounding “heavy” is really about the construction of the instrumental segments, and yeah, he’s using pretty well known metal riff styles, it really doesn’t matter what tuning you’re playing in, it’s the technique, but that’s just what i’ve observed and my opinion
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Sietse Willems / March 18, 2016 6:56 pm
i like this tuning way more! the sound is cleaner and less muddy, i feel like i can hear more details.
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Anthony BlackFoot Martino / March 20, 2016 3:38 am
if you tune down and loose clarity than you need to learn about string tension, it helped me a lot
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