Percussive metal sounds?

flying_pie

Palm muting, Tubescreamer into dirty amp and noise gate are essential as is the angle of the pick.

It's hard to describe using just text but if you hold your pick flat so it is in line with the strings then it won't sound right. It'll be too nice. You need to angle it so that it's cutting across the strings - just like when you tremolo pick. That creates a much more percussive sound as you're effectively scratching the string instead of neatly plucking it.

guitarfishbay

Alegree said:

Anything percussive asks for compression - as all mentioned previously, you can achieve that with either a compressed pickup (active or active toned) or tons of gain in the form of a boost or a lot of preamp gain.

Anything with a clicky attack has a transient, compression or too much gain will reduce that.

Most metal tones with a lot of attack don't have as much gain as people think, and the player is picking quite aggressively to generate the transients (the player being the most important factor by a long distance IMO). 

The tone shaping before the distortion is important - usually means reducing lows and boosting upper mids.  Often done via a tubescreamer or similar.  EMG 81 or similar also helps because it chops off the deep lows at source which keeps the sound tighter.  Less low end before the distortion will help it be more percussive, as too much low end will mean a more saggy response (relatively).

Josh Middleton is an awesome metal rhythm guitarist.  He goes over some technique in this video.



I've always thought the guys in Slipknot were awesome rhythm players too.  This whole tracking session is cool to , but the 'type writer' thing the OP is interested in is heard at around 3:50.  It's all in the picking technique, you can get an idea of the amount of energy he's putting in to it throughout though on all the mutes.



The picking technique is the most important factor, after that it's setting up the equipment for a tight sound where there's not too much bass before the distortion.  If you pick very softly you won't get tight percussive metal tones regardless of the equipment used.

Bucket

That Slipknot vid is killer. They get some stick here and there but Mick Thomson is a hell of a good player.

bassbora

timmysoft said:

Theres a couple of different ways of getting that sound.

 Active pickups into a high gain amp or hitting the front end with boost. You can also do both of those things if you're proper metal core! You can scoop or boost the mids, but the important thing is the attack, something like an Ibanez TS808 with the volume up full, gain down at zero and tone marginally boosting the highs helps with that.

 My favourite example would be:

Totally loved that.  Thanks for sharing.