Two hundred and fifty beats a minute, counted in sixteenth notes. That is roughly sixteen strokes every second shared between two limbs, held not for a fill but for the length of a verse, and it is the ordinary cruising speed of a death metal drummer. Nothing else in popular music asks for it. Start there, because once you accept that number the rest of the machine makes sense.
This article is about the music itself rather than the story around it. What the guitars are tuned to. What the right hand does. What the drums are doing under it. How a voice gets that low and why nobody minds that you cannot understand it. Why the songs do not have choruses. If you want the history and the definition first, that is a separate page; this one takes the machine apart on the bench and names the parts.
Start with the tuning
A guitar in standard tuning has its lowest string at E. Death metal almost never leaves it there. The common settings run from D standard, one whole step down, through C standard and on to B standard, which puts the low string a full fourth below where the factory left it and gives the six strings B, E, A, D, F sharp and B. Some bands go further. The point is not depth for its own sake.
A string tuned down that far loses tension. It moves further when you hit it, it takes longer to settle, and it produces a note with far more of its energy sitting under the range where the ear hears pitch clearly. That is the trade. You give up definition and you buy weight and menace. It also changes what your left hand can reach: chord shapes that sound noble in E turn muddy in B, so the writing moves off chords and onto single note lines and two note power shapes played low on the neck, which is exactly where death metal riffs live.
The second consequence is the one nobody warns you about. Down there, the difference between a good tone and a wall of mud is a matter of a few decibels in the middle of the frequency range, which is why this music is obsessive about amplifiers and pedals in a way that thrash never had to be.
The right hand and the left foot
Two techniques do most of the work, and they are both endurance problems rather than dexterity problems.
The first is tremolo picking: the same note or pair of notes struck as fast as the wrist will go, held for whole bars, so that a line stops being a series of attacks and becomes one continuous tone with a serrated edge on it. It is how a riff that would sound thin at one note per beat turns into a solid block of sound. The second is palm muting, the heel of the picking hand resting on the strings at the bridge, which chokes the ring out of a note and leaves a dry percussive thud. Death metal alternates the two constantly, and that alternation is the genre's basic rhythmic grammar: choked and dry for the ground, open and buzzing for the climb.
The riffs themselves are built out of chromatic movement, notes walking up or down in half steps without settling into a key, with the minor second and the tritone leaned on rather than avoided. This is the technical reason death metal sounds sick rather than angry. Thrash riffs mostly resolve. These do not. They are written to keep the ear waiting for a landing that never arrives, and the tension that produces is the entire emotional payload of the style.
Underneath, the drums. The blast beat is a single stroke roll traded between snare and kick at sixteenth note speed, and it comes in named varieties: the traditional blast, alternating snare and kick with the cymbal locked to the kick; the bomb blast, eighth notes on the snare over sixteenths on the kick, which is the one 1990s death metal used most; the hammer blast, kick and snare struck together; and the gravity roll, the newest of them, which uses the snare rim as a pivot so one hand produces two notes. Mick Harris of Napalm Death named the thing and put it on record with Scum in 1987. Modern blasts sit between 180 and 280 beats a minute, with 250 as the working average.
What the blast beat is actually for is not speed. It is a floor. A guitar tuned to B and picked in a continuous tremolo has no rhythmic edges of its own, so it needs something underneath it that is dense enough to stand on, and a snare hit every sixteenth note gives it exactly that. Take the blast off and the same riff floats.
Tone is the third variable and it is not a detail. Entombed recorded Left Hand Path at Sunlight Studio in Stockholm in December 1989 with Tomas Skogsberg engineering, in under a week, with the guitars in B standard and a Boss HM-2 distortion pedal with all four controls turned to their maximum. Earache released it in Europe on 4 June 1990. That setting does not so much distort a guitar as flense it, taking the note off and leaving the noise the note was wrapped in, and within two years half of Sweden had bought the same pedal. Ask anyone in this music about the buzzsaw sound and they mean that box, at ten, in that room.
The voice, and why the words are printed in the sleeve
The death growl is a technique, not an absence of one. Instead of vibrating the true vocal folds alone, the singer brings the false folds sitting above them into the sound, which drops the perceived pitch, adds a rasp the throat could not otherwise make and lets the note be held at volume. Vocal fry is the other common route in. Both are learned, both can be done safely and both are routinely done badly: a 2007 report from the Radboud University Nijmegen Medical Centre described patients treated for swelling and polyps on the vocal folds after growling with poor technique, and Melissa Cross built a whole teaching career on the problem with The Zen of Screaming in 2005.
A growl hands the words to the rhythm section and keeps the rhythm for itself. You are not meant to read it. You are meant to feel where it lands.
Practically, the growl is a percussion instrument with a pitch floor. Consonants go first, then syllable clarity, and what survives is placement, length and attack, which is why two singers doing apparently the same thing are instantly distinguishable to anyone who has listened for a month. John Tardy does not sound like Chris Barnes, and neither of them sounds like Karl Willetts, and none of it has anything to do with words. The lyrics go in the booklet because the band knows.
Songs built in blocks, not verses
Here is where the genre departs furthest from everything around it. A death metal song is usually a sequence of riff blocks, each one repeated a few times and then abandoned, connected by tempo changes rather than by a returning chorus. Some records go a whole side without a single repeated section. Verse and chorus writing exists in the melodic wing of the genre and almost nowhere else, and even there it arrives late.
Suffocation made the most consequential structural addition. Recorded at Morrisound Recording in Tampa in June 1991, Effigy of the Forgotten put a full stop in the middle of fast songs: the band drops to half speed or less, the guitars sit on a low chugging figure, and the whole thing lands like a dropped anvil before the tempo returns. "Liege of Inveracity" is widely cited as the first of them. Two decades of slam and a great deal of what happened afterwards in heavier music come out of that one idea.
Complexity arrived from a different direction. Death recorded Human at Morrisound in May 1991 with Scott Burns producing, with Paul Masvidal on second guitar, Sean Reinert on drums and Steve Di Giorgio playing fretless bass, and Relativity released it on 22 October 1991. Odd time signatures, audible bass, arrangements that go somewhere rather than around. It is Death's best selling record and the point at which the technical wing of the genre became a real thing rather than a tendency. Every band named on this page has a fuller entry in the chapter this belongs to, so use it as the index while you read.
The sound of the room
Two production schools set the standard and both are audible immediately. Morrisound in Tampa, with Scott Burns at the desk, produced a dry, close, hard packed sound: kick drum with the ring taken out of it, guitars stacked and gated so they stop dead when the hand stops, voice parked flat in the centre. Sunlight in Stockholm did the opposite, a wet, saturated wash where the guitars bleed into everything and the drums sit inside the mix instead of on top of it. Almost every death metal record made between 1989 and 1995 is chasing one of those two rooms.
None of this is difficult to hear once someone points at it. Put on any record from the genre and count off the parts: the tuning in the first two seconds, the picking hand in the first riff, the blast when it arrives, the voice, the block where the chorus should be, and the room the whole thing was recorded in. Six things. That is the machine. What the machine is being used to say is the next question, and it has its own answer in Death Metal Meaning.
