Bullet For My Valentine Style

Hi GMC!

Welcome to my new lesson based on the style of this great metal band called Bullet for my valentine. I personally like this band because they combine a Metalcore style with classic heavy and thrash metal roots.

"Bullet for My Valentine are a Welsh heavy metal band from Bridgend, formed in 1998. The band is composed of Matthew Tuck (lead vocals, rhythm guitar), Michael Paget (lead guitar, backing vocals), Jason James (bass guitar, backing vocals), and Michael Thomas (drums)." - Wikipedia

Music Style:
As I said before, this band can be defined as a perfect mix between Metalcore and Heavy Metal. They cited bands like Slayer, AC/DC, Gun’s and Roses, Metallica, Pantera, Machine Head, Iron Maiden, Korn, Testament, Megadeth and many others as their influences. This can be really noticed in their sound which is, at the same time, very personal. In this lesson you will notice that I took their more aggressive side and created a tune that recreates their way of creating riffs, guitar melodies and arrangements.

Tonality, Chord Progression & Scales:
As it usually happens with Metal bands, their favorite tonalities are minor in order to get their dark sound. This composition is in C minor tonality and that’s the scale used for riffs and guitar melodies. I also found Phrygian mode and also Harmonic minor scale in their songs.

Techniques:
This is mostly a metal rhythm lesson so the main techniques used here are palm muting, only downstrokes, alternate picking, legato and vibrato. The tempo is very fast so you will have to be able to play tight if you want these riffs to sound good over the backing track.

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: I used dropped C tuning.

Tempo: 190 BPM

Ok guys – set your amp level at 11 and start rocking!