Metallica’s Black album was a watershed in more ways than one. For a start the album and accompanying tour propelled Metallica from a successful genre band to world conquering stadium heroes. Secondly it saw them ditch their complex, vaguely prog-influenced, thousand-riffs-a-song approach to songwriting in favour of something altogether more simple.
Here’s the video to Enter Sandman, the first song from the album.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRYDetbwegs]
In contrast to almost everything from their previous albums, this song has only one riff, one simple idea. To construct the song, this riff is taken through some simple variations, but stays essentially the same.
First you hear the clean version of the riff. Its based around an E minor arpeggio that moves, via a Bb to an A chord. E to A, that’s all.
Second, the bass and drums come in with some open E pedal notes and tom thumping. The guitars turn on the distortion and join in with pedal E notes.
Third, the pedal E notes a gradually replaced with the notes of the riff, E Bb A.
Fourth A standard rock beat kicks in and we get the rocky version of the riff. E’s, Bb A three times, then a tail made up of G’s and F#’s. This gives way to the verse. What is the verse? The main riff simplified down so its just E pedal notes, the occasional F for colour, plus that G and F# tail we’ve just heard.
Fifth, this is the cunning bit. In the ‘Sleep with one eye open,’ section we get the riff from the intro, but now its distorted and has changed key to F# minor. (That’s up two frets to you guitarists). Which means the chord progression is now F#, C, B, rather than E, Bb, A.
Sixth the chorus is just a simplified version of that F#, C, B, progression with a couple of E’s thrown in.
And that’s pretty much the whole song.
One riff:
- a clean version
- a rocky version
- a simplified version
- and two versions in a different key.
All they do is put that into different orders to provide them with solo section, one of the best middle eights in the business and a great outro.
One riff and a bit of thought and they wrote one of the most succesful heavy metal songs ever. Are you getting as much as you could out of each of your musical ideas?
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great idea!!
thanks for giving the example of using key changes.