It’s just that if you want a sound closer to the doom heroes, you might want to consider Gibson pickups, or even PAF pickups if you like that sound. This doesn’t mean you can’t get a doom sound with more modern/focused pickups (like many high output Seymour Duncan and DiMarzio pickups). So if you want to get a doom metal guitar tone, you’ll first want to look for a pickup with plenty of bass, and lots of overtones. For doom metal, these frequencies are exactly what we’re looking for. In modern genres (like progressive metal and djent), where extreme clarity is wanted, these frequencies are unwanted. Having too much of a certain frequency will thicken up the sound and create ‘mud’. With this comes the amplification of generally unwanted frequencies. This results in massive amounts of overtones and natural clipping. When a guitar tone is saturated (or ‘distorted’) with gain, certain frequencies are greatly amplified. That natural muddyness and bass that comes along with some guitars (like a lot of Gibsons) lends itself perfectly to this genre. We’re not looking for special, super precise, high gain pickups with a very focussed sound, we’re looking for thick and sludgy. These styles of guitars are very popular, so there’s lots of choice within any budget.Ī good guitar for doom metal is preferably a guitar with a very thick sound.
Grindcore focusses on shocking the listener with hard to decipher rhythm and ridiculously fast tempos, whereas doom metal tries to give a sense of impending doom (pun intended) by slowing things down and extending the songs far beyond the ten minute mark.ĭoom metal players often favour guitars like the Les Paul and the SG for their amazing sustain and naturally thick sound. This style is very extreme, but in a different sense from grindcore for example. Doom throws all that out the window, and is more focussed on creating a thick sound with insane amounts of gain and sustain. Many of the more modern genres rely heavily on focussed, somewhat surgical guitar tones. It’s typical for a doom metal guitarist to play some sort of SG or Les Paul through a gigantic Orange stack with tha gain cranked. Something else that characterises the sub-genre as a whole: dirty guitar tones.