The first five Metallica albums may still be the most essential, but the majority of them were written with standard tuning. That doesn’t take away from them in the slightest, but the Paranormal Guitar Channel on YouTube decided to take a handful of songs from their earlier years and play them in D standard tuning. “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” “Enter Sandman,” “One,” “Seek and Destroy” and “Wherever I May Roam” are fine in their current form, but sound more sinister at a lower key. Guitar World, which is where we first saw this, notes that some of their earlier stuff, like “The Thing That Should Not Be” and “Sad But True,” are in D standard or drop D tuning, so it’s not like they’d never done it before. Will Hardwired… To Self Destruct mess around with tunings? We’ll see, but so far, the album’s title track is standard tuning. The album will be out on November 18th and can be preordered here.
