Sepultura Style Rhythm

Hi GMC!

Welcome to my new lesson! This time I decided to cover the most popular Latino American metal band ever: Sepultura! This Brazilian band made a revolution with their album Roots and as we are close to a reunion of the original members I thought that it was a good moment to this lesson.

Music Style:
Sepultura started their career in 1984 and their first albums where pure Death and Thrash metal. With the pass of time they started to incorporate Brazilian influences and we can say that with albums like Arise (1991), Chaos A. D. (1993) and Roots (1994) they’ve became a unique band. In this lesson I tried to re-create the style of those albums where groove, thrash and Brazilian folk were the essence. You will listen to percussive arrangement in my backing trying to illustrate the sound of excellent songs like Roots bloody roots and Ratamahata.

Tonality, Chord Progression & Scales:
As it usually happens with Death and Thrash metal bands, they prefer minor Aeolian and Phrygian modes for their compositions, with the addition of Phrygian Major or Dominant. These scales give a dark feeling to the music and that’s what they are looking for. This tune is in D minor, but I go from Aeolian, Phrygian and Phrygian Dominant, so please check the slow videos for detailed info about each riff.

Techniques:
This is a rhythm guitar lesson so it’s excellent for training you picking hand. We will use alternate picking, only down strokes, palm muting and power chords. Be sure to check the homework in the last video part where you will find some extra assignments to master metal rhythm.

Sound:
I used my Pod HD 500 to create a tone based on Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier Amp and Head.
The drums have been recorded using SSD 3.5 and the bass with Trillian.

Click HERE if you want to download the patch used on this lesson for Pod HD 500.

Tuning:
Drop D

Tempo: 120 BPM