whiplash!

this motherfucker right here

so i decided to try some metallica stuff today. i listened to a few of my favorite tracks and settled on "whiplash" and "seek and destroy." they sounded fairly simple (for metallica, that is), and in all honesty, they are. i'm not a total beginner by any means, ive been "playing" for a few years (mostly just dicking around trying to sound badass), but i feel like i can master these couple with only a few days work. and maybe someday i'll try to learn the solos. fucking kirk hammet...

anyway, i started out with the more, what i like to call "fuck yeargh!" song . "whiplash," obviously sounds way more fuck yeargh! so, i look up the tabs, and holy shit! this stuff is really easy. just a couple bars of chugga chugga with some variation of power chord or double-stop tacked on to the tail end. okay, i underestimated the chugga-chugga riffing. i'm trying my ass off to get the right number of notes in before the power chords. i've got the speed down, but i can't seem to get the right number of notes out in the two bars i'm working with... i either end up cutting to the power chords too soon, or waiting half a beat too long to play them. pissing me right off...

on to "seek and destroy." much, much, much easier for me to grasp. the opening riff is giving me a little bit of grief with some off the fingering, but i'll get it in just a couple hours i think. the other rhythm riffing ain't too bad at all... is mostly relatively slow chugging eighth notes, either palm muted low e's or some double stops or some individual notes. the pre-chorus is stumping me a bit, because i'm not hearing what i'm seeing in the tabs. its probably just my crappy laptop speakers or something in the way i'm playing it thats just a bit different than the way kirk and james played it on the album. that's about as far as i can go right now. the pre-solo stuff(you know, the part where the tempo jumps from slow burn to what-the-fuck-shredfire)is giving me a damn good fight, might take a couple of days to beat those few bars into submission.

well, that's all i can do for now... with the rhythm going smoothly, all i can do now is hope to one day be brave enough (and patient enough) to break down the solos to manageable, slow-moving, bit-sized chunks and start really annoying the dogs.