The song

I first encountered this song in March 2024, and I decided to start working on learning it at the very end of October. If you’re not familiar with Entombed, they’re a genre-defining Swedish death metal band. They released this song when they were just 17 years old (!); I’m not sure what you were doing at 17, but I certainly wasn’t pushing the frontiers of music.

I learned the song pretty quickly; it’s really not that complicated, mostly just tremolo and a few power chords and chugs. But wow is it fast! I put the song down and came back to it every so often as I worked on other songs.

I finally eventually hit a breakthrough after shifting gears, and found myself able to play 16th note tremolo at 180bpm, then 190, then 195, etc. slowly creeping up to the 220bpm needed for this song. Among other things, I had to learn some new tricks for tremolo picking: hold the pick at a 45 degree angle, perpendicular to the plane of the strings, barely touch the strings (let the cranked gain do the work), toss your pick as soon as it dulls any, minimize all movements. I also swapped to top light bottom heavy strings since the floppiness was a challenge to deal with.

Recording

I stripped out the guitar tracks using this web tool, which I’m pretty sure is just running this open-source tool on the backend. Sadly it didn’t get that dive-bomb harmonic out, but also I don’t have a guitar with a whammy bar so maybe it’s for the best.

Then I recorded everything in Ableton roughly following this quote fromUffe Cederlund in a Reverb Interview:

I just used a worthless Ibanez guitar, a small Peavey combo amplifier, and a Boss Heavy Metal pedal. Basically, there are two Boss Heavy Metal-distorted guitars – one in each speaker – and a DS-1 in the middle.

I used Blue Cat’s Free Amp on Modern Drive, with significantly boosted Bass, Treble, and Drive on the left and right guitars, and I backed off all 3 on the middle guitar. Each playthrough was a single take, but many takes were requried. I mixed that with the guitar-less track and got the audio you hear above.

Then I recorded a video of a fourth playthrough, removed the audio and subbed in my track. If the video doesn’t line up with what you’re hearing, that’s why – the video is just for show. But doesn’t it look way more rad with the video than just a blank screen or a static image?