Three weeks. That is how long At the Gates spent at Studio Fredman between May and July 1995 getting the rhythm guitar tone for Slaughter of the Soul before anybody recorded a usable take of it. The vocals took three days. Four hundred and seventy kilometres east, five years earlier, the equivalent decision had been made in about ninety seconds by turning four knobs on a distortion pedal as far right as they would go.
That is the difference between the two Swedish scenes, and it is not a matter of taste or of which bands you prefer. It is a chain of physical objects, a microphone technique, a region of the frequency spectrum and two completely opposed ideas about what a record is for. Take the two apart component by component and every argument anybody has ever had about the Swedish chapter resolves itself.
The Stockholm chain, item by item
Start with the pedal, because everything else at Sunlight Studio was fitted around it. The Boss HM-2 has four controls: Level, Distortion, and a two band equaliser labelled Color Mix L and Color Mix H. Boss's own account of the circuit is specific about what those two do. The L control works on the guitar's lowest frequencies. The H control puts a spike into the signal at around a kilohertz. Turn both to maximum, as the standing instruction in the city was, and the signal arrives with a shelf at the bottom and a needle near the top and comparatively little holding the space between them together.
Then the rest of the chain, which is short and cheap on purpose. Tomas Skogsberg ran the pedal into a Peavey combo that never left the room, put a single Audio-Technica ATM41 in front of the speaker, and pushed the signal through a mixing desk he has described as carrying more electricity than it was supposed to, with a rackmount compressor squeezing the attack on the way past. Guitarists reconstructing the tone since have found the same answer at the amplifier: bass around three, treble around six or seven, and the mid control turned almost off. That is one microphone, one amplifier, one pedal and no separation of any kind.
One chain removes the frequencies that let two guitars be heard as two guitars. The other was built to protect them. Everything else is consequence.
The Gothenburg chain, item by item
Studio Fredman starts appearing on records in 1993, run by Fredrik Nordstrom and co-owned for a period by the man who would sing for In Flames, and the technique it is remembered for is the exact opposite of a pedal on full. The Fredman method puts two dynamic microphones, normally a pair of Shure SM57s, on a single speaker at once. One sits square on the centre of the cone and captures attack and brightness. The second is angled away from it, at fifty five degrees by Nordstrom's own account, catching a darker and lower version of the same signal. The two are then blended, and the phase relationship between them is the tone control.
That is a technique for shaping a guitar sound rather than for detonating one, and it costs time. It is also why the band asked Nordstrom to buy a twenty four track desk before they would start Slaughter of the Soul, a request that caused friction and got made anyway. Three weeks on one tone, a new desk, a guest solo from Andy LaRocque on "Cold", mastering by Noel Summerville, artwork commissioned from a painter. Sunlight made records in days. Fredman made them in weeks, and the west coast bands were spending money the capital never had and would not have spent if it did.
| Sunlight, Stockholm | Fredman, Gothenburg | |
|---|---|---|
| Distortion | Boss HM-2, every control on full | Amplifier gain, kept controlled |
| Equalisation | Bottom shelf plus a spike near 1 kHz | Mid range kept intact for harmony |
| Microphones | One, straight at the cone | Two on one cone, one at 55 degrees |
| Time on the guitar tone | Minutes | Weeks |
| Two guitars in the mix | Fused into one mass | Separated and audible |
| What the sound is for | Weight and filth | Melody and legibility |
Tuning is the red herring
Everybody who writes about this reaches for tuning first, and tuning is the least interesting variable in the whole comparison. Both scenes detuned. The Stockholm guitars were dropped a long way below standard pitch and fed to the pedal in that state, and the west coast bands were not playing in standard either. If you tune a guitar down and hand it to each city you get two records that sound nothing alike, which is the proof that the pitch is not doing the work.
What is doing the work is the mid range, the band between roughly four hundred hertz and a kilohertz and a half where a guitar's note actually lives. A harmony line in thirds is two notes moving in parallel, and the ear separates them by the information in exactly that band. Scoop it and the two lines fuse into a single moving slab, which is precisely what Stockholm wanted and precisely why nobody in the capital ever wrote a twin lead worth remembering. Keep it and the same two lines stay legible at two hundred beats per minute, which is the entire technical basis of melodic Death Metal and the Gothenburg Sound. The bands did not choose their styles and then find the equipment. The equipment they could reach decided what kind of writing would survive it.
What each city was actually trying to do
The intent is where the technical differences stop being accidents. Tomas Lindberg described the aim on Slaughter of the Soul as refusing to clutter the music with anything unnecessary, wanting to be more direct and more brutal, and that is a songwriter's statement: it assumes there are parts you could remove and parts you must protect. The Stockholm records are not built that way at all. They are built as objects, single continuous surfaces where the riff, the growl and the room arrive together and no individual element is meant to be picked out.
Both positions are defensible and both were punished. Stockholm's approach makes a record that still sounds enormous thirty five years later and cannot be developed, so the second and third albums by every band in that city sound like the first one with more money. Gothenburg's approach makes a record other people can learn from, which is why an entire American genre was built out of it, and it also means the sound belongs to anybody who buys the same microphones. The full roster on both sides, with dates and current status, is in swedish Death Metal Bands.
Stockholm made an object. Gothenburg made a document. You cannot revise an object and you cannot frighten anybody with a document.
Rafael Quintero, KaosMetal
How to tell them apart in one bar
Listen for the pick. On a Stockholm record the attack of the plectrum on the string is gone, absorbed into the distortion, so what you hear at the start of a note is not a strike but a swell. On a Gothenburg record the attack is the first thing you hear, sharp and dry, because two microphones were arranged specifically to keep it. That single detail will identify a Swedish record's city faster than any riff will.
Then count the guitars. If you cannot tell whether there are one or two, it is Stockholm. If you can follow both and hear them move apart and come back together, it is Gothenburg. And if the answer is neither, if you can hear the room around the drums and the bass has its own frequencies, you are probably listening to a country that solved the problem some other way, which is most of the genre and the subject of the pillar on where it all began.
