Metallica has partnered with online music education platform Yousician for an intensive course in which guitarists James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett will show you how to play the band’s biggest hits.
Hetfield and Hammett’s electric guitar boot camp will demystify some of the core skills needed to play rock and metal guitar, with the Metallica course broken down into riffs, rhythm and lead sections.
Lead guitar? Enter, Kirk Hammett. You might want to have a wah pedal on hand. You will definitely need a high-gain guitar amp or a distortion pedal with a little oomph behind it but don’t go overboard. Course objectives might include ways of combining seat-of-the-pants pentatonic sextuplets with a soupçon of Phrygian exoticism, and perhaps the most important skill of heavy metal guitar playing, muting.
As for rhythm guitar and riff writing, there are few, if any, better in the world than James Hetfield. He even has the words “Riff Life” tattooed on his hands. Players signing up to this course will soon experience at close quarters the the most fearsome downpicking technique on the planet, the engine room behind tracks such as Battery and Master Of Puppets.
These are but two of the Metallica standards that Hammett and Hetfield will teach, with the ‘tallica syllabus also including lessons in Enter Sandman, Nothing Else Matters, One, Fade to Black, Welcome Home (Sanitarium), Mama Said, and For Whom The Bell Tolls.
The Yousician platform is powered by AI and delivers real-time feedback to help chart your progress. Though we would like to think the design incorporates a door-slamming supercut from Some Kind Of Monster if you really mess up, and onscreen pyro when you finally master the One solo in its entirety without needing oxygen.
Hadley Spanier, Yousician’s head of artist partnerships, promises an up close and personalised learning experience.
“Players will have the opportunity to learn how to play like Metallica straight from Metallica,” says Spanier. “The unique course pairs unmatched access to the band with Yousician’s AI technology so that guitarists-in-training not only get to learn from the masters, but also get the feedback they need to improve.
“Players will feel like they are part of the band, playing alongside their idols as they try to master some of the greatest guitar-driven songs of all time.”
Furthermore, there are in-depth interviews with the whole of the band, with drummer Lars Ulrich and bassist Rob Trujillo sharing their wisdom, too.
For more details, head over to Yousician. A yearly membership is priced from €58.09.
Check out our pick of the best online guitar lessons here.
