James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett On Some Of Their Favourite Metallica Songs

Kirk Hammett and James Hetfield look back on some of Metallica’s brightest moments for Guitar World.

“Seek and Destroy”
Kill ’Em All (1983)
JAMES HETFIELD The idea for “Seek” came from a Diamond Head song called “Dead Reckoning.” I used to work in a sticker factory in L.A., and I wrote that riff in my truck outside work. This was our first experience in a real studio. I used a white Flying V, which was the only guitar I had back then. I still have the guitar in storage. The song is based around a one-note riff that was up a little higher. Though most of my riffs are in E, that one worked off an A.

KIRK HAMMETT When I was doing that guitar solo, I was using James’ Marshall. That was the Marshall—it had been hot-rodded by some L.A. guy, the same guy who hot-rodded Eddie Van Halen’s Marshalls—and when it came time to do my guitar leads, I just plugged into that. I had maybe four or five days to do all my leads. I remember thinking, There’s 10 or 12 songs on this album, so that means two a day. I had to throw down a solo, not think much about it, and move on.

I had my trusty old Ibanez Tubescreamer, my trusty wah pedal and my black Gibson Flying V that I used on the first four albums. It was either a ’74 or a ’78, I’m not sure. I didn’t have much really worked out; I knew how I wanted to open the initial part of the solo after the break, so I just went for it two or three times. And then the producer said, ‘That’s fine! We’ll use it!’ There were no frills, no contemplation, no overintellectualizing—we weren’t going over the finer points. On a couple of notes in that solo, I bend the notes out of pitch. For 18 years, every time I’ve heard that guitar solo, those sour notes come back to haunt me! [laughs] I remember on that tour, whenever it came time to do that guitar solo, I was always like, Okay, I’m gonna play this so much better than the way I recorded it!

I had been taking lessons from Joe Satriani for, like, six months prior to joining the band, so his influence was pretty heavy in my mind and in my playing. He passed down so much information to me, I was still processing a lot of it. When it came time to do the solo, I was thinking, I hope Joe likes this. I hope this isn’t something he’ll just pick apart, like he has in the past.

“The Four Horsemen”
Kill ’Em All (1983)
HETFIELD Dave [Mustaine, Metallica’s original guitarist] brought that song over from one of his other bands. Back then it was called “The Mechanix.” After he left Metallica, we kind of fixed the song up. The lyrics he used were pretty silly.

HAMMETT Prior to recording that song, we put in a slow middle section that wasn’t there when I first joined the band, and it needed a slow, melodic solo. I remember going through the song with everyone, and when I got to that part, I played something really melodic. Lars looked up at me and said, “Yeah, yeah!” He’s a big lead guitar fan. One of his biggest influences is Ritchie Blackmore. For that song I put down one lead, then added one on a different track. I wasn’t sure which one to use. I listened to both tracks at once, to see if one would stand out. But playing both tracks simultaneously sounded great, and we decided to keep it like that on the record. Some of the notes harmonized with each other, and I remember Cliff [Burton, bassist] going, “Wow, that’s stylin’—it sounds like Tony Iommi!”

“Creeping Death”
Ride the Lightning (1984)
HETFIELD We demoed “Ride the Lightning” and one other song in the studio before we recorded the album, so there’s actually a demo somewhere of those three songs with different lyrics. When we did the crunchy “Die by my hand” breakdown part in the middle, I sat in the control room after we did all the gang vocals, and everyone was just going nuts! That was our first real big, chanting, gang-vocal thing. There was almost some production value to it. That whole album was a big step for us. By then I had the Gibson Explorer. I grew to love that shape better than the V.

HAMMETT When we first began playing that song in the garage, I noticed that the lead guitar part also incorporated the chorus. I thought that was a good opportunity to play something a bit wild and dynamic. The first figure in that song pretty much came off the top of my head. I was still using the black Flying V and the Boss distortion pedal through Marshall amps, with a TC Electronics EQ. For that song, Flemming [Rasmussen, engineer] suggested that I double-track the solo, which made it sound a bit thicker and fuller. We did that solo, after which we had to do this small fill at the end, a four-bar break with four accents afterwards. The plan was to fill the break up and play something over the four accents. When I studied with Joe Satriani, I did this chordal exercise, a diminished chord with four notes. I just played that over these four accents, and it worked out real nice.

“Fade to Black”
Ride the Lightning (1984)
HETFIELD That song was a big step for us. It was pretty much our first ballad, so it was challenging and we knew it would freak people out. Bands like Exodus and Slayer don’t do ballads, but they’ve stuck themselves in that position which is something we never wanted to do; limiting yourself to please your audience is bullshit.

Recording that song, I learned how frustrating acoustic guitar can be. You could hear every squeak, so I had to be careful. I wrote the song at a friend’s house in New Jersey. I was pretty depressed at the time because our gear had just been stolen, and we had been thrown out of our manager’s house for breaking shit and drinking his liquor cabinet dry. It’s a suicide song, and we got a lot of flack for it, [as if] kids were killing themselves because of the song. But we also got hundreds and hundreds of letters from kids telling us how they related to the song and that it made them feel better.

HAMMETT I was still using the black Flying V, but on “Fade to Black” I used the neck pickup on my guitar to get that warm sound. I played through a wah-wah pedal all the way in the “up” position. We doubled the first solo, but it was harder to double the second solo in the middle because it was slow and there was a lot of space in it. Later I realized that I harmonized it in a weird way—in minor thirds, major thirds and fifths. For the extended solo at the end, I wasn’t sure what to play. We had been in Denmark for five or six months, and I was getting really homesick. We were also having problems with our management. Since it was a somber song, and we were all bummed out anyway, I thought of very depressing things while I did the solo, and it really helped. I played some arpeggios over the G-A-B progression, but we didn’t double track that solo. When that was finished, I went back and did the clean guitar parts behind the verse. James played an arpeggiated figure while I arpeggiated three-note chords. We ended up getting a very Dire Straits–type sound.

“The Call of Ktulu”
Ride the Lightning (1984)
HAMMETT Again, we were using Marshalls; I tracked the whole album with Marshall amps and my Gibson Flying V. For that song, I knew that I wanted to come up with something really melodic at the beginning of the solo. At that point in the song, there’s just a lot of riffing, a lot of heavy dynamics. I was thinking, Wouldn’t it be nice if we had something somewhat melodic to lead into it? Hence that little melody I played. I can remember thinking, Fuckin’ hell, man, these guys want me to play an awful-long fucking guitar solo! It was our first instrumental, and it was an incredibly long guitar solo. It was, like, ‘How can I keep this solo going without making it sound like I’m just playing a bunch of notes?’ So I thought that I would break it up into sections rather than play one long spew of notes. I used a modal approach, and there are also arpeggios that I play in the solo. They’re actually ‘broken arpeggios,’ a term that I got from Yngwie Malmsteen. At that time, 1984, Yngwie was big in the guitar world; he influenced me in that he was using all these different scales and different arpeggios, and really got me thinking about that kind of sound. I was also thinking chromatically: there’s that one part at the top of the next cycle where I play a chromatic lick that goes all the way down the high E string with the wah pedal.

I actually wrote out the entire solo on pieces of paper, using my own notes and my own pet names for the individual licks. I would say that 80 percent of it was composed beforehand and 20 percent of it was improvised. When we revisited that song with the symphony on S&M, it was a lot of fun. It felt like I was visiting my guitar technique from, like, 15 years ago or something. I just don’t play like that now—I’m a lot bluesier—so it was pretty trippy.

“Welcome Home (Sanitarium)”
Master of Puppets (1986)
HETFIELD The idea for that song came from the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. “Fade to Black” worked well, and we wanted to have another slow, clean, picking type of song, this time with a chorus. I had trouble singing that chorus. It’s really high, and when I went to sing it in the studio, I remember Flemming looking at me like, “You’re kidding.” I said “Shit, I don’t know if I can do this!” So I ended up singing it lower than I intended, but we put a higher harmony on it and it worked pretty well. The riff for that song was lifted from some other band, who shall remain anonymous.

HAMMETT The beginning of the first solo is an arpeggiated ninth chord figure, where I basically mirror what James is playing. The second guitar figure had some harmonies. I used a wah-wah pedal on the third solo, which was pretty straight ahead. The fourth solo comes out of harmonized guitars; the very last lick was based on something really cool I saw Cliff play on guitar in the hotel one night that I knew would work in that spot.

“Master of Puppets”
Master of Puppets (1986)
HETFIELD I think we wanted to write another song like “Creeping Death,” with open chords carried by the vocals and a real catchy chorus. On Master of Puppets we started getting into the longer, more orchestrated songs. It was more of a challenge to write a long song that didn’t seem long. The riff for that song was pretty messy—constantly moving. It works good live. People love to scream “Master!” a couple of times.

HAMMETT I used my Jackson Randy Rhoads V for this solo. When you listen to the solo, there’s this weird sound right after the mellow part where it sounds like I’m hitting a superhigh note in the midst of my phrasing, like I’m fretting the string against the pickup. Well, what happened was, I had accidentally pulled the string off the fretboard! You know how you take an E string, you pull it down toward the floor away from the neck? I accidentally pulled down on the string, and it fretted out on the side of the fretboard. We heard it back, and I was like, ‘That’s brilliant! We’ve gotta keep that!’ Of course, I’ve never been able to reproduce that since; it was like a magic moment that was captured on tape. That was one of my most favorite things about that guitar solo. I thought I had screwed the solo up by accidentally pulling on the string, but once I heard it back, I thought it sounded great. That was definitely a keeper!

For the next solo we used backward guitar parts. To get them I played a bunch of guitar parts that were in the same key as the song and laid them down on quarter-inch tape. Then we flipped the tape over and edited it, so we had two or three minutes of backward guitar. We put it in the last verse of the song.

A lot of people think I actually came into my own sound on that song. That had everything to do with buying Mesa/Boogie Mark II-C heads. Boogie made those heads for a short time in the mid Eighties and only made a limited amount of them. They moved on after that, and they haven’t really been able to recapture that sound since—I don’t know if they ever tried or not. But there’s something about Boogie Mark II-C heads that were really unique and very individual in their gain stages and overall sound. Most of Master of Puppets was tracked with Boogie heads and Marshall heads combined, and I used my Gibson Flying V and my Jackson. By that time, I also had my black Fernandes Stratocaster.

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