In a new interview with Rick Beato, producer Rick Rubin talked about working on Slayer’s ‘Reign In Blood’ and explained the difference between Slayer and Metallica.
“I was going to California to make my first record. [It] was Slayer’s first album’Reign In Blood.’ I asked [Jay Burnett] if he wanted to engineer the record,” Rubin explained. “I remember this, he came to where I was living which was on Broadway in this weird loft. […] I remember Andy came over and I played him a few different records, AC/DC, Metallica.”
“I had a theory now. This is not based on being a musician [or] being a technical person. This is based on being a fan and theoretical, just thoughts,” he continued. “So when I hear very fast music like Metallica, the sounds are big sounds. Like on rock records, the whole thing gets blurry and you can’t really hear [the] fast tempos. If you’re playing if the music is fast and if the sounds are big, there’s not enough space for those big sounds to happen next to each other. There’s no punctuation, it becomes a blur.”
“I played him a Metallica record as an example of what I thought was wrong and I said, ‘Would it be possible to record in such a way that it was hard sounding but everything was short because it’s fast and we want there to be this?’ I didn’t want it to be a blur of bass, I wanted it to be a pulse,” the producer concluded.
During the early years of both bands, they were competitive, but not rivals. “Metallica and Slayer were never very close,” Metal Blade CEO Brian Slagel said. “They were competitive. I was friends with both bands, and Metallica would ask me, ‘What are Slayer doing? What are they writing?’ And the Slayer guys would ask me, ‘What are Metallica doing?’ It was, ‘Who’s faster? Who’s heavier?’”
Rubin went on to produce both Metallica’s ‘Death Magnetic’ and Slayer’s ‘Reign In Blood.’ The Slayer album was his first time working with a metal band.
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