Did Joseph Quinn learn "Master of Puppets"? He did, and he plays most of it himself in the final episode of Stranger Things season four, which Netflix released on 1 July 2022, but the hands on the solo belong to a guitar double, Aidan Fisher, and the guitar on the soundtrack is not his at all: the riff and the solo you hear carry additional tracks recorded by Tye Trujillo, then seventeen and the son of Metallica's bassist, laid in beside the band's own recording.
The man on the roof of the camper van, a Warlock in his hands, is Joseph Quinn, and the performance is a three-man job. It was put together the way a crew takes a safe, the face man standing in the light where every witness can see him, the safecracker's fingers working the dial in a close-up nobody remembers, and a third man in a back room packing the gelignite that blows the door clean off its hinges, so that what looks on screen like one long-haired guitarist tearing through a thrash classic is three pairs of hands, each doing the part it was hired for. Nobody hid the arrangement. Quinn described it himself within three days of the finale.
None of that turns the Upside Down solo into a cheat. Quinn learned the song, played most of it on the day against a guide track that kept him locked to the recording, and left the solo to a specialist.
Did Joseph Quinn actually play Master of Puppets on screen?
Playing guitar since he was very young and handed the scripts for the last episodes, Quinn went out the next morning, bought a new guitar and "manically started learning" the song, grinding at a piece of more than eight minutes until the Duffer brothers' finale had a rock concert to show. He had a foundation, he said. He did not yet have that song.
The Duffers had not known he could play at all. When they asked during the pandemic, he wrote back that he was "no virtuoso" but could "get away with looking like I play guitar", a modest fuse for the charge that followed, and by 10 July the show's writers had put video of him playing the song online.
The roof sequence was the first scene shot after the Christmas break, with the pandemic still pressing on the set. Quinn and Gaten Matarazzo, who plays Dustin, climbed onto the camper van and "just got into it", Quinn playing along to a guide track while the sound that reaches the audience belongs to the recording, not to his strings.
A guide track is the finished recording played back on set, loud enough for the actor to lock onto, so that every downstroke on camera lands where the final mix will put it. That method forgives nothing in a wide shot. If the arm on screen falls a fraction behind the record, the whole sequence comes apart in front of anyone who has ever held a pick, and the roof scene does not come apart.
What looks on screen like one guitarist is three pairs of hands, each doing the part it was hired for.
The fastest playing went elsewhere, and Quinn said so plainly. He played most of the song, he said, but for the solo the production brought in "a kind of black belt metal guitarist", because the solo was a specialist's job. Between the wide shots of Quinn, the hands fretting the solo are Fisher's, and Quinn has since put it in his own words: he let "this brilliant guitarist, Aidan, take care of the more complex fingering."
| Part of the scene | Whose hands |
|---|---|
| Wide shots of Eddie on the camper van | Joseph Quinn, playing along to a guide track |
| The solo, between the wide shots | Aidan Fisher, guitar double |
| Guitar heard in the riff and the solo | Additional guitar tracks by Tye Trujillo, beside Metallica's recording |
| Coaching for Tye's parts | Kirk Hammett, who sent recordings of himself playing the solo and the rhythm |
Did Eddie actually play Master of Puppets, or was it Tye Trujillo?
The teenager whose guitar the audience actually hears is Tye Trujillo. Preparing in spring 2022 to leave for dates with Suicidal Tendencies, he was known to the producers as a bass player, and they did not know whether he played guitar until he told them he played both. He practised the parts they sent hard in his room, then laid them down in late April at Venice Studios in Los Angeles, a small amplifier for the raw sound and a Charvel for the solo, a good while before the 2 May deadline.
He had help from the source. Kirk Hammett, who played the lead on the 1986 record, sent him recordings of the solo and the rhythm parts to learn from, and when the episode went out, the end credit read "Additional Guitar Tracks by Tye Trujillo", with Robert Trujillo thanking Hammett in public. Hammett praised the lead too, noting that Tye is a bass player rather than a guitarist and had pulled it off anyway.
That puts the solo in two sets of hands, Fisher's on the screen and Tye's on the soundtrack, with Quinn's own in the shots where the whole of him fills the frame. What is not in doubt is that the hands playing the actor's part and the hands making the noise were not the same hands, and that nobody involved pretended otherwise.
Why the riff punishes a right hand that has not earned it
The difficulty of "Master of Puppets" is not in the left hand, where the shapes are simple enough for a bedroom beginner, but in the right, because the riff is played with downstrokes throughout, the pick striking every note on the way down and travelling back up in silence. The wrist works it like a panel beater on a crumpled wing, a long run of short identical blows, each one landing before the last has stopped ringing, beating the dents out of the steel at a pace that leaves no breath between strokes. Alternate picking gets the notes. It does not get the sound.
At the speed the record runs, that is gruelling work for a player who has done it for years and a war of attrition for one who has not, the picking hand tiring and falling behind the pulse just where the riff needs to stay hardest. The song is unsparing about it. The riff comes back again and again across more than eight minutes, and every return asks the same wrist for the same downstroke at the same weight.
This is why a mimed right hand gives itself away to any guitarist in the audience within a bar, and why Quinn's hours of practice were worth the trouble. A camera can cheat a fretting hand with a cutaway. It cannot cheat a picking arm in a wide shot, swinging at full height, in a song half the guitarists in any audience have tried to learn themselves.
What Metallica made of Eddie
The band that wrote the song answered within four days of the release, "totally blown away" by the scene and calling it "an incredible honor" to be such a big part of Eddie's journey, and three days later a split-screen video set Hetfield, Hammett, Ulrich and Robert Trujillo rocking out in Hellfire Club merchandise beside Eddie on the roof, captioned "Eddie, this is for you!"
Quinn met the band backstage in Chicago before they headlined Lollapalooza, and the film of the meeting shows Hetfield telling him the show had been a bonding experience with his kids and thanking him for doing the song justice, the band taking him to their rehearsal space and saddling him with one of Hetfield's ESP Snakebyte guitars, Lars Ulrich counting four and the group crashing into the opening riff together, and Hammett crying "You're hired" while Ulrich announced that Metallica was now a five-piece. They sent him off with a signed B.C. Rich Warlock modelled on the one Eddie plays.
That night the band closed its encore with "Master of Puppets" while the screens behind the stage ran footage of Eddie from the episode and the scene, and the verdict on the man who had played it there was already in.
Quinn learned the song. He played most of it himself, gave the solo to a specialist, and said so in his first interviews about the episode. The record on the soundtrack belongs to Metallica and to a seventeen-year-old bassist. The performance on the roof belongs to Quinn, and the band that wrote it invited him to play it with them.
