The Riverside five who walked into King Size Soundlabs in Los Angeles in the first half of 2007, plugged guitars tuned to drop A into their amplifiers and hammered the songs of The Cleansing into the walls of the live room together, as one band in one room rather than one part at a time, as Mitch Lucker told the MTV Headbangers Ball podcast on 26 June 2008, were Suicide Silence. Then the tapes crossed an ocean, and Tue Madsen mixed them at Antfarm Studio in Denmark, before Century Media put the record out on 18 September 2007.
Two years later that method was gone. The band built its second album, No Time to Bleed, piece by piece at the Machine Shop in Hoboken, New Jersey, with Machine producing, and finished tracking on 13 March 2009.
That move from the room to the parts is where the deathcore guitar tone comes from. The sound most people mean by it, the low string that lands like a punch and stops dead, the wall of rhythm guitar that fills both speakers without a crack in it, is only partly played. The rest is built after the guitarist puts the pick down.
Picture the campground behind an outdoor summer bill on the morning of the show, and a bassist splitting firewood with a maul on a stump. The head comes down, the round bursts apart with one flat crack and the halves fly off the block, and then there is nothing, no ring, no hum, no echo bouncing off the trailers, until the next round is up on the stump and the maul comes down again. That is a gated chug. The blow is the palm-muted low string, the halves flying are the hit landing in the room, and the dead air between swings is a machine slamming the door on everything the amplifier would otherwise leave hanging.
The low tuning is only the first decision, and like the breakdown it serves it has the history it belongs to. Once the string is struck, the note still has four stops to make before it reaches you.
Tension: why a low string needs a longer neck
Tune a guitar string down and it goes slack. Tension falls with the square of the pitch, so the same string taken from the open E down to the A a fifth below keeps less than half the pull it had, and a slack string misbehaves in every way a recording shows up: it bends sharp on the attack, it slaps the frets, and it smears the low note into a woolly cloud that no amount of gain will sharpen.
A low string without tension is a tow strap between two vans in an icy parking lot. Left slack, it slaps the asphalt and the dead van does not move an inch. Hauled taut, it hums, the frozen wheels break loose with a bang and the second van comes ripping out of the snowbank on the end of it. The taut string drags the note clear.
Guitarists answered the slack with thicker strings first and longer necks second. The seven-string and eight-string instruments that carried the genre down to A and below came with heavier gauges and, more and more, with baritone scales and fanned frets, which give each string its own length so the lowest one can be strung longest and tightest of all. Ralph Novak's patent on the multiscale fingerboard, US 4,852,450, was granted on 1 August 1989 and ran out on 30 June 2008, which left the fanned fret open to every maker. Ibanez had already shown its eight-string RG2228 at the Winter NAMM Show in 2007, the year The Cleansing reached the shops.
Clarity first, gain second. That order never changes.
Gain, the gate and the silence after the chug
Run a low string into a high-gain amplifier and the distortion squashes the loud and the quiet together, so the note sustains long after the hand has stopped it and the hiss and hum of the rig climb up to meet it. In the middle of a riff nobody hears the noise. In the gaps, everybody does.
A noise gate is the cure. It is a switch with a threshold: above it the signal passes, below it the channel shuts. Engineers had long used gates to kill the hiss of distortion in the rests of a guitar part. Set fast and hard on a seven-string, the gate slams the channel shut the instant the palm-muted note decays, and a chug pattern comes out with knife-edge holes in it, every gap in the rhythm a true dead stop instead of a smear of feedback. The riff is cut as much as it is played.
The heaviest thing on a deathcore record is often the hole between two chugs.
The engineer behind the desk for Oceano's Depths in 2009 and for Emmure's Speaker of the Dead, released by Victory on 15 February 2011 and produced, engineered, mixed and mastered at the Foundation in Connersville, Indiana, was Joey Sturgis, and in September 2014 he told Sound on Sound that a note struck ten or twenty times in a riff has to come out with the same amount of gain and bottom end every time, though never copied and pasted, because that starts to sound fake. Consistency is the whole tempered edge of the sound.
His way of getting there, as he described it in 2014, three years after Speaker of the Dead, starts with a clean signal. The guitar goes straight through a DI box into the computer, and the amplifier sound is added in software afterwards, which means the tone can be changed long after the performance is over and every note can be inspected on its own. "Children of Cybertron" opens that record.
Four takes, two sides: how the deathcore guitar tone gets its width
The wall comes next. The classic metal wall is four separate performances of the same rhythm guitar part, one panned hard left, one hard right and two tucked just inside them, and the width comes from the tiny differences in timing and pitch between real takes. Copy one take four times and the part only gets louder and starts to phase. Play it four times and the part swells to fill the room.
Think of four pairs of hands under a stage diver, none of them lifting at quite the same instant, so the body rides higher and wider across the room than any two arms could have thrown it, all the way to the front, where it gets slammed down onto the steel of the barricade. Four takes carry the riff the same way. The small disagreements are the lift.
The catch is that the disagreements have to be small. Loose doubles turn four takes into a blur, so the first pair has to lock before the second pair goes on, and the editing that follows is unsparing: Sturgis described going through the waveform note by note, deleting any string left ringing underneath a single note and recording it again.
So we look at every little note and make sure it's on the grid, on time and in tune.
Joey Sturgis, Sound on Sound, September 2014
The same producer also put his finger on the price. Stack three guitars on one part, he told the magazine, and the sound gets bigger but less sharp, until it is too thick to push to the front of a mix, while a single guitar can be turned up as loud as anyone likes. Size against edge. Every record in the genre picks its point between them, and the choice is audible in the first bar.
Carving out the bottom: where the low end goes
Four low-tuned takes stacked on top of each other can turn the mix into a swamp of low-end mud that buries the kick drum and the bass, so engineers cut the guitars' lowest range away. It sounds backwards. The heaviest guitars on these records are guitars with their bottom octave excised.
The guitars give up that octave the way a touring van gives up its spare tire and a crate of unsold seven inches, both pitched onto the shoulder of the interstate so the bass rig fits in the back. The space is not lost. It is handed to the kick and the bass, and what the room hears as one enormous chug is three instruments struck in the same instant.
That is the arithmetic under the barrage. When the guitar plays a palm-muted note, the bass plays the same note and the drummer hits the kick, all three land, in Sturgis's words, perfectly in line and perfectly in tune, and the guitar only has to carry its share of the blow. Pull the bass and the kick out and the same guitar track sounds thin, almost polite. Put them back and it caves the room in.
The guitarist who produces his own band's records at Graphic Nature Audio in Belleville, New Jersey, and who admitted to Mix magazine in July 2019 that he had once had trouble placing the low end and low mids in his mixes until a new pair of monitors fixed it, is Will Putney. Released by Nuclear Blast on 25 October 2019 and produced by Putney for Fit for an Autopsy, the band he plays guitar in, The Sea of Tragic Beasts came out with a sound that Metal Insider heard as crisp yet thick, with nothing buried in the mix. Putney is credited with the engineering, mixing and mastering as well, so the whole chain from tone to master runs through one pair of hands.
Lead guitar is the one place where the rhythm rules get broken. A solo wants sustain, which the gate takes away, and air around it, which four rhythm takes fill, which is why the old question, do deathcore bands play solos, gets a different answer from a 2007 record than from a 2022 one.
The rhythm sound is the opposite of a solo in every respect. It is a low string held taut on a long neck, distorted until it sustains and then switched off the moment it should stop, recorded four times and edited until the four agree, and robbed of its own bottom octave so the bass and the kick can strike with it. None of those steps is heavy on its own. Together they are the reason a deathcore record moves a room before anyone on the floor has heard a single word of the song.
