“Not many people want to watch a band stand in front of their amp line”: Metallica guitar tech thinks ditching real amps helped the band improve spectacle of their live shows
Those of us immersed in guitar culture love to see the gear a band is using front and centre when they’re performing onstage, but what about the average fan?
Sure, a wall of amps at the back of the stage was, for decades, part of the spectacle of seeing a heavy metal band perform live, but with the increasing prevalence – and quality – of digital amp modellers, many bands are opting to shun the logistical burden of heavy amplifiers, and instead reach for more compact modellers for their live tones.
According to Chad Zaemisch – guitar tech for Metallica frontman James Hetfield – fans don’t really miss the presence of physical amps from a visual point of view, either.
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In an interview in the new issue of Guitar World, Zaemisch reflects on Metallica’s transition from physical amps to digital amp modellers, as the group remain one of the top live forces in the world, still in the midst of their massive M72 World Tour.
As is often the case with the adoption of new technology, there was a single event which sparked Metallica’s transition to amp modellers. And that came with their one-off Freeze ‘Em All concert in Antarctica in 2013.
“We were kind of forced to come up with a solution for playing a show in Antarctica where we couldn’t have speakers,” Zaemisch reflects.
“For environmental reasons, they didn’t want any noise pollution. We had a lot of help right off the bat. Matt Picone from Fractal came and got all our sounds started. It was definitely a learning curve for us and the band, but once we got through that, everybody started to look at how convenient it was.”
Zaemisch credits James Hetfield’s open-mindedness with Metallica’s eventual adoption of digital amp modellers.
“James wants to know all of the different ups and downs of things and, you know, he can play through whatever he wants,” he continues.
“The fact that he chose to kind of say, ‘Well, maybe we’re the ones to embrace this and use it to its fullest extent,’ I really had to hand it to him because we were excited to use this stuff.”
But outside of sound, removing walls of physical amps from the stage presents new opportunities in terms of stage design, and according to Zaemisch, most fans don’t really care anyway.
“The people in set design realised that if we don’t have this wall of speakers anymore, we have all of these other things available to us.
“Everybody’s all about content these days, and not a lot of people want to watch a band stand in front of their amp line with nothing else going on. Now we can use large video screens. It opens up a lot more opportunities to do different things.
View a full list of Metallica’s upcoming live dates via their official website.
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