AVENGED SEVENFOLD’s M. SHADOWS: “Technology Overuse Is Killing Metal And Rock”

Avenged Sevenfold vocalist M. Shadows is tired of bands overusing technology to make their music boring as hell. In an interview with The Ex-Man podcast, Shadows detailed how he feels bands are overproducing their music and overusing technology to the extent that it’s making it all dynamic-less crap.

“There’s a lot of vocoder and things we’re doing on this record. But we’re not using ProTools vocoder, right? We brought out the keyboards, we’re singing into stuff, we’re talking [through] the talk box…but I think as you do that stuff and you do all those new, forward-thinking things in an organic way, I think it just has a knack to it that’s very cool.

“One thing that I think, and I’ve said this on Twitter and you get ‘Old man yelling at the clouds’, I think technology overuse is killing metal and killing rock. Everyone’s using the same samples, they’re using the same tools to fill out the speakers, they’re brickwalling their mixes, the vocals pop and it’s way on top…the normal person that listens to that, they’re like, ‘This just sounds like one straight line of something, but it’s not appealing to me because there’s no dynamic, there’s no this or that, it all sounds the same.’ I think that’s why bands like Tool, bands like System, they really stand out because there’s so much dynamic, there’s so much realness happening.

He continued: “I think there’s a reason why rock has a hard time translating. Some of these songs…I think, like, what would Master Of Puppets sound like if the drums were quantized, everything was filled out on the speakers, everything was perfectly tuned…it just wouldn’t have that same thing that it makes you feel.”

It’s a little funny Shadows uses Master Of Puppets as an example, given producer Flemming Rasmussen has openly admitted that James Hetfield tuned his guitars down on the record so they could be later sped up and in pitch. But yeah, we get what Shadows is saying.