Mr. Tabs

New Metallica Lesson

Added 2024-05-28 14:26:09 +0000 UTC

This early Metallica song has Mustaine and Burton written all over it. Awesome instrumental. Ride the Lightning is my favourite Metallica album overall. I love how Kirk doubled the leads on most of his songs back then.

For this one I used several different live performance videos to help figure out who plays what. Kirk plays some parts differently and I tried to highlight that with the Charvel. For the solo, Kirk plays the arpeggios in an uncommon way but I duplicated that as best I could. For the descending scalar run, it’s a little unclear what happens position wise because the live performances are a bit spotty for this part, either the camera wasn’t on Kirk or he just goes off on the wah. So I tried to play this part as logically as I could. Kirk gets a lot of flak but he was on fire on this album. James slightly switches up how the clean outro is played. It’s almost exactly like the first time but there is a different note being played.

Hope you enjoy digging into this one! Backing track and Amplitube tones are below.