Venom Style

by Gabriel Leopardi

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  • Hi GMC! 

    Welcome to my first Black Metal lesson ever at GMC! This time I decided to explore new horizons and I analyzed the style of Venom to create this powerful and extreme tune. Venom is an English band formed in 1979 and considered part of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. They are a major influence on trash metal and extreme metal bands, and their second album (1982) gave the name to an extreme metal subgenre: Black Metal.

    Music Style: 

    As I said ealier, Venom has influenced lots of bands, but they have been also been influenced by great bands to create their unique style. They cited bands like Black Sabbath, Judas Priest, Motorhead, Kiss, The Who, Sex Pistols and many others as their main influences as musicians. If you check their music you will find characteristics of the cited bands in their songs, but I could say that those are mostly from Black Sabbath and Motorhead. I basically analyzed their first two albums to compose this tune. I learnt many of their riffs and paid attention to chord progression and rhythms.

    Tonality, Chord Progression & Scales: 

    This lesson is in F# minor. The tonality is also minor, but you will find the use of chord that don’t belong to a natural minor tonality. They used to search for progressions that sound black, dark and demonic. That’s why you will find a big use of the bII chord (G) and also the dimished 5th chord, C5. You will find the whole progression over the tabs and also in the main video.

    Techniques: 

    This is a fast rhythm lesson so it’s a great one for training your metal rhythm abilities.
    We will use mostly power chords and one string riffs, some strumming and palm muting.

    Sound: 

    I put a big effort in getting an overall sound close to the albums “Welcome to hell” and “Black Metal”. I mixed the drums with a lot of room and the guitar tone is very crunchy. I used my pod HD500, EZ drummer for drums, Hallion for bass tone and a tape saturation plug in to get a vintage sound.

    Something weird happened when I finished the mix of this tune… some subliminal messages from some type of evil appeared there at 00:37. I took that section and reversed that audio and found this. Besides this, there was no way to render the video in colour, the original files have full hd colour but after the render it always converts in Black & White for some reason.

    Tuning: 
    I used standard tuning for this one.

    Tempo: 
    140 bpm 

    Ok guys – It’s black metal time, so the sunny days are gone…

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