Guitarists From The United States

"Awake, I’m being disembowelled Rotation pulling out the guts Tortured by this tool Intestines on the spool"

"It got to the point where it entered global politics. That's something I never imagined, and I never heard [Senator] actually say these words, but he said this about us: "[Cannibal Corpse] is deplorable. They have a song about having sex with a severed head." I wish I could have heard him say that shit. I'd love that sound bite."

"Bob Mould manages to crunch and jangle, often at the same time. In Hüsker Dü alone, he pioneered and defined a few American punk eras — hardcore, pop punk and early stirrings of alternative rock. These changes all occurred as his songwriting grew. His guitar work grew with it. He’s always appreciated and utilized the MXR Distortion + pedal’s sawtooth wave grit. Employing an Eventide Harmonizer electronically created a 12-string-like ring as ‘60s pop melodicism sank more into his work."

"He definitely brings a more technical side, as far as playing goes. He usually writes the crazier songs and the more technical-sounding songs and probably technically hard-to-play songs. [...] I know, usually, vocal-wise, they definitely are [the most challenging to perform]. [...] His songs are usually fast, but when he slows down, it's pretty much heavier than fuck, heavier than anything you're going to hear."

"The part is all on the C# string [E tuned down a minor 3rd], so it’s really easy to keep it going. Things get a little trickier when you start skipping strings. I didn’t think it was necessary for the part to make it harder than it needed to be, so I kept it all on the C# string so I could pedal along nicely. I kept it at a tempo where I can comfortably play 16th-notes, which is 172 beats per minute. It’s still fast, but once I start getting past 180 BPM, it gets tough."

"We saw that a lot of bands in Florida seemed to have more of a darker, anti-religion thing going on, so we decided to do the gore thing with the art and lyrics."

"(on O'Brein's returning to performing) Having not been onstage for a while, he wondered, 'Are these people going to want me around?' We were, like, 'Come on, Pat. You're Pat O'Brien. These people want to see you.' I can appreciate how he felt about it after all he had been through. I could imagine there was an intimidation factor about it. We got up there and he said, 'I think I'm going to lay low in the back, get up and play and be done.' As soon as we got onstage and people saw him, the place went nuts. I said to the crowd, 'Hey, look, you all know Pat, right? Show Pat some love.' And they went nuts. They adore this man. Who wouldn't? If you ever met him, he's one of the nicest people you'd ever meet. He's one of the greatest at what he does, too. Then he started taking pictures with people and talking [after the gig]. He had a big smile on his face. That was so worth it. Here was a guy who needed a good break in his life and we needed help from him to get the show done. It couldn't have been any more perfect."

"The shed we rented smelled like rat shit and it was hotter than f–k. We had an air conditioner that didn’t do shit and we’d be totally soaked by the time we were done practicing. But we were determined."

"This kind of music helps people get through negative things. I mean, you're taking something negative and turning it into something positive by making it into music -- instead of actually going out and doing something violent. There's plenty of ways to turn things around, and that is what death metal did for me. [...] It got me through alot of negative things in my life -- it was always there for me."

"With Cannibal Corpse, it’s always a ‘song first’ kind of thing for me. Some of the side projects I’ve done have allowed me to stretch out a little bit more [in terms of style], but Cannibal is really about being a big, heavy rhythm machine, and stepping out too much might detract from that."

"If you really saw someone get their brains bashed in right in front of you, I think it would have a pretty dramatic impact [...] you'd react to it, no matter how many movies you've watched or how much gore metal you've listened to [...] even though we've got crazy entertainment now, our social realities are actually a bit more civilized than they were back then [...] we're not hanging people or whipping them in the street and I think that's positive improvement for any society."

"Ralphie was a character. He was a crazy person. He always liked to party. He maybe partied too hard. That's a [price] you sometimes have to pay when you party too hard in life. I was very sad last year that he wasn't in a band anymore; he wasn't in an active band anymore because he was such a great player. His background was always more the '70s stuff like and . He loved all of those '70s players, but he brought this stuff into death metal. He was one of the first really skilled lead players in death metal back in the day. He was always funny, also, and had a very black humor. Every time we played in Florida, he came to the shows and brought his great humor and great entertainment to the shows. It was very sad for me to see; I think the fact the tragic ending had to do with everything involved in his music business. When you kind of don't play in a band anymore and you're used to it and you stay home all the time, and you see all your friends touring and you don't, and you're such a passionate musician as him. That was really something that killed him also in a mental way. I was talking to him often and he was always hopeful for a new project. It never really happened. It's very sad because Ralphie was one of a kind. He was one of the guys you met, you meet him once, you'll never forget him."

"I couldn’t hear the bass in a lot of the thrash [metal] I was listening to. It seemed like the bass was doing exactly what the rhythm guitar was doing, so that’s what I tried to do. I think that shaped my righthand technique, having to learn how to play the really fast stuff with three fingers. I didn’t realize a lot of these guys were cutting things in half [playing half the notes] or doing something a little different. I’ve always played fingerstyle since we got Cannibal going, just trying to keep up with the guitar players. In thrash, there’s not as much of a bass–drummer connection as there is a bass–guitar connection—at least I didn’t see it that way in the beginning. [...] When I started, I played fingerstyle with two fingers, and not very fast. I could get going to a respectable speed, but not something crazy like Jeff Berlin or Juan Alderete. But then we did a show with Cynic and Malevolent Creation. Cynic’s bass player, Tony Choy, played with three fingers, and Malevolent Creation’s bassist plucked with four. I said, “I have to be able to keep up, and I’m not going to use a pick. I have to be able to figure out how to do it with my fingers. [...] Around that same time, I was listening to Sadus a lot, which is the band that Steve DiGiorgio originally came from. I could tell the bass was played fingerstyle, and it was really fast. I managed to track down Steve’s phone number, so I called him up and asked, “Dude, how do you do that?” He explained his technique, which was going from the ring finger to the middle to the index back to the middle—there’s your four notes. I was very grateful, and we’ve been friends ever since. I tried to learn that way and got it down, but as I would start to drift off in doing muscle-memory practice, my technique would start to fall into a different technique. That was the one that I described in the book, where it ends up being a 12-note cycle. You’re basically playing a triplet pattern, but it ends up feeling like straight 16th-notes. So Steve’s tip helped get me started, but I ended up developing my own thing."

"My heart is broken, but I know he loved me unconditionally and will always be with me [...] It is the same with all of us, he will be with you everyone, everyday and his love will surround us now and forever."

"I think alot of these stupid fucks who are so up in arms about bands like Deicide [...] It's stupid. If they want to like really worry about evil and shit like that they shouldn't be worrying about a metal band, they should be worrying about child molesters and fuckin' Darfur and things like that."

"The thing is, I hardly know anyone that I share a view about religion on. Every person's different, and Glen absolutely fucking hates Christianity. Who am I to tell him what to think and what to do? I'm just as fucked up as anybody else. The thing with the death threats starting was because of this: when we were supposed to play in Chile, the fucking douchebags that worked for the promoter plastered the poster — the one that had a picture of Jesus with a bullet-hole in his head — all over the city when they had specifically been told not to do that. They put it on churches and everywhere else and so the mayor got pissed off and he had the show cancelled. Then in the hotel, some girl came up to me and asked me for an interview. I asked her who it was for and she told met that it was for some webzine, which later turned out to be a major newspaper. She asked me how I felt about that, and what I said was that I was pissed off that those idiots did that and got our show cancelled. Not that they made the flyer look like that. And in the article, they twisted it around and misquoted me. She also asked me what I thought about some fan who had murdered a priest in Chile last year. Now, I'm not a very patient person, and I have a really low tolerance for stupidity. I was like: 'What the fuck kind of question is that?' Of course I don't condone some asshole murdering a priest. Then suddenly a bunch of people started sending me all sorts of messages on MySpace, threatening to kill me, and a lot of those people are probably pretty serious. Personally I'm not afraid and I'm not intimidated, and all those people can fuck off. I'll tell you this though, a couple of months ago we were playing with Vital and [Dave] Suzuki came running up to me on stage and grabbed me, just to kind of fuck with me. I didn't see who it was at first, and when it happened, I thought it was some guy who was coming up to stab me. So that was funny, but it freaked me out. Then when the cops pepper-sprayed me in Texas, the first thing I saw was someone holding something to my face and I thought I was about to get shot. That freaked me out a little bit. But, you know, I'm not worried about those people. If somebody wants to shoot me, they can shoot me."

"I'm not going to tell people that what they believe is wrong at all. I'll drink and I'll party more than ten fucking black metal bands put together. I'm definitely not a choir-boy. I have my own thoughts on religion, but at the end of the day, I just want to play my guitar and play metal and have a good time. The rest of that shit is none of anybody's business. What I'll never do though — I'll work at McDonald's before I pretend to be someone I'm not just so that people accept me. I guess that attitude is what's caused a lot of the problems in my life. But there are two kinds of people in this world. One kind — and Glen is one of them — aren't afraid to be themselves. There's another kind that, for some reason, that offends them, and that pisses me off. I will be myself, and I don't really give a fuck what anyone says. I know who my friends are, and that's all I need. The funny thing is that these metal kids are constantly ripping on me on Blabbermouth, and I'm really close friends with a lot of the bands whose T-shirts they're wearing. I'm not going to pretend to be some dark and angry and evil person so that people think I'm metal. I have all of that in me, but the most important thing is that I play my guitar, and you either like it or you don't. I really don't care one way or another."

"Unless you’re an experimental metal band by nature, people don’t really want that experimentation, I don’t think. They want us to try and out-do what we’ve done – I don’t think people want us to stand still and put out the same album again and again but I think what they want is something stylistically consistent and hopefully even a little better than the last album. When bands go too far away from their style it’s generally not well received in the metal community. Consistency is a big part of our genre."

"[Learning music theory] can spur your creativity. I’ve found that the guys who don’t know as much theory tend to write things in 4/4 most of the time. The guys who know theory are the ones who end up experimenting more and having music that sounds a little more out there, which I like. The more you know, the more you can mess around."

"We kept giving [him] chances because we’re nice guys. Well, not so much me. I was the one totally against him coming back and forth like that. It was more like [drummer] Steve [Asheim] and [guitarist] Jack [Owen], who are friends with the guy, wanted to keep giving him chances. I’m not the type of guy to give chances. I just kind of went along with it reluctantly. Finally, there was an issue in Europe on one of the tours and I chucked his ass off the bus and called it a day. [...] Man, without going into great detail, let’s just say the guy’s a trainwreck and leave it at that."

"Oh, it was a problem with new stuff I was writing. I walked into practice and had re-recorded it and changed notes here and there for three or four songs that I had. It was stupid at the time. But he's, like, 'Hey, I changed the notes so I get writing credit.' And I'm, like, 'That's not how the songs go, though.' And 's like, 'It is now.' [Laughs] So I literally walked out and ghosted them. [Laughs] Later on, it was like, 'Hey, dude, you're out.'""

"We were just kind of writing the record, and we were going over the songs. Me and Glen, we were, like, 'We wanna redo the songs.' It's like we had completed them — about nine or twelve, whatever how many songs. They were all right, but we weren't really psyched about them. So we decided to rewrite them. And Jack didn't really like it. And he kind of left one day and just never came back. So that was that. He's not on [the new album]. I haven't talked to the guy in almost a year."

"I don't know ANY secrets about playing guitar, and there's no fairy dust that you can sprinkle on your guitar to make you good or great. To master an instrument requires suffering. It is also a process, not something that can ever be finished... If you REALLY want to play great, there's only one way — work. It's like trying to take down a mountain with a toothbrush — you can never finish, just scrape a little more every day."

"People who don’t know this music think it’s just a bunch of noise and it’s really easy to play. That’s totally untrue. You may not like it, but death metal is really complex. You have to have a really fine-tuned ear to appreciate it and a lot of the guys in these bands are incredible musicians."

"Even though we record to Pro Tools with a click track, I think we’ve learned how to use it in a way where everything still sounds organic. I feel like we managed to capture an old school death metal vibe. It doesn’t sound like one of those modern metal productions where everything is overly precise."

"Ram an axe into your mound [...] Shit onto your guts [...] A stupid cunt we sacrifice"

"Bodies deformed way beyond belief Cast out from their concerned society"

"Pull the plug -- let me pass away Pull the plug -- don't want to live this way"

"Naming your band Death is either tongue-in-cheek insolence or a proclamation of utter sincerity, and Chuck Schuldiner was not given to flippancy where his music was concerned. Next to his family, music was most important to him, and this clarity drove him. To call his band Death was to equate his life’s purpose with the most unimaginable end to which we all will go: it was predestined and non-negotiable. With Death, Chuck affirmed his life."

"You will not return alive -- left to die Suffering until the end -- left to die"

"Sharing both pleasure and pain Two hearts, two minds, one soul Seperating mentally An illusion of privacy Together -- they absorb eachother's lies As one -- they will live and they will die A living hell has begun"

"Schuldiner’s guitar playing and ability as a song writer grew immensely since the band formed in the early 1980s in Florida. His stamina and precision in guitar playing was impeccable. But by the late ’80s/early ’90s the primitive, zombie, blood and gore obsessed death metal had evolved to a more progressive style with lyrics delving into the dark side of human nature and suffering. [...] Schuldiner is often included in lists of the best metal guitarists for his innovative and passionate approach to playing death metal music."

"Chuck came to the studio knowing exactly what he wanted to do. His "vision" was fully formed and complete, as he intended to recreate the sound he had in mind for Death. The recording process required no experimenting or trying things out; Chuck's plan was to just get this sound he created on tape. Chuck was an eager and dedicated teenager of 19. Throughpout the project there was just Chuck and his drummer Chris in the studio. The two of them worked hard and were very well-prepared and efficient. My engineer Casey and I watched Chuck and Chris realize their vision. What I find incredible is that what Chuck and Chris accomplished with [Scream Bloody Gore] became the prototype for much of what followed in extreme metal for the next three decades."

"Life will never be the same Death can never be explained It's their time to go beyond Empty feeling when they're gone"

"I think he was a perfectionist. He really had a high standard and maybe that made it harder for some people to work with him and meet those demands. And as the band went on, the music just got more complex. It was easy to play that kind of music poorly, but it was very hard to keep up with someone like Chuck."

"Cannibals practicing the art of butchery Emotions don't exist, pain you can't resist"

"Chuck Schuldiner’s legendary perfectionism elevated the genre from dumb-guy heavy metal to truly progressive and inventive art, and the legacy his all-too-early passing left solidified Death’s status among the absolute greats of the genre."

"Seizure now sets in Torture will begin Example made from those to see Your freedom turned to misery"

"Extreme music, more specifically the death metal sub-genre, would cease to exist without the musical brilliance of Chuck Schuldiner. [...] Within metal, there are few musicians who’ve shown such a profound prowess for technical and melodic guitar playing, all while playing music as extreme as death metal. Chuck Schuldiner was the epitome of this."

"It's difficult trying to articulate what it is about this instrumental Death song off Human — essentially arranged and written in the studio — that speaks to me. It doesn't have Chuck's voice in the literal sense, but it contains all the vital harmonic, melodic and rhythmic components that branded Death's sound. But it also has something else. It's reaching for truth, and it holds a majestic beauty that gave Death's songs their greatest potency. What I'm remembering is the beginner mind approach in which this song took shape in the studio. It was driven by instinct and spontaneous creative freedom. Our collective energies united and we swam into the 'Cosmic Sea,' trusting we wouldn't need a life raft. Chuck's story was liberated without words. 'Cosmic Sea' is a journey straight into the heart of Death and, for me, an auditory memory of what an old friend felt like at his best."

"Schuldiner broadened death metal’s horizons, dragging it out of the fetid gore and unworked thrash into something more sophisticated, programming intelligence into its necro physiology, and in the process recruiting some of the most technically gifted musicians the scene has had."

"Won’t you join me on the perennial quest Reaching into the dark, retrieving light Search for answers on the perennial quest Where dreams are followed, and time is a test"

"Trapped Inside a life which is not yours Spirits within causing terror, fear and darkness."

"Decapitated head licking your cunt"

"His music is timeless. It still sounds as fresh as it did when it came out. Plus, Chuck’s style on guitar is unmatched: it’s the perfect mix of melody, technicality and brutality. I’m extremely lucky to have been not just part of the band but also a close friend of Chuck’s. He inspired me, and he continues to inspire me, every day."

"Did we set out to do something that was so unusual? No. [...] This was very much my concept, which may have helped. Apart from Chris, it was a one-man show. And when you’re virtually working on your own, it can sharpen the vision."

"There were loads of people in the local area up for it, and I could have settled for someone who was OK, but not brilliant. That wasn’t what I wanted. To make Death as good as I believed we could be, I had to have a line-up that kicked ass on all fronts."

"I’m glad to see that a lot of these metal bands today are incorporating more traditional elements into their music because that’s where it all comes from. I never lost touch with that through the years, but I was very much crucified for it a while back. And I guess it’s good to know that I was doing the right thing."

"I got fed up with writing about crap monsters. What’s horrific about that sort of thing? The real evil in this world goes on in society. I’d just reached a time in my life as a person and as a musician when I felt angry enough to write about it."

"I don’t mean to dwell but I can’t help myself [...] Do you remember when Things seemed so eternal?"