Skip to main content
Music Radar MusicRadar The No.1 website for musicians
Sign in
  • View Profile
  • Sign out
  • Artist news
  • Guitar Amps
  • Guitar Pedals
  • Synths
  • Guitars
  • Drums
  • Keyboards & Pianos
  • Controllers
  • Software & Apps
  • More
    • Recording
    • DJ Gear
    • Acoustic Guitars
    • Bass Guitars
    • Tech
    • Tutorials
    • Reviews
    • Buying Guides
    • About Us
More
  • "Worst rap album in history"
  • Superbooth 2025
  • Eilish vs Radiohead
  • 95k+ free music samples

Recommended reading

Flemming Rasmussen
Producers & Engineers “All the albums I did with Metallica were recorded on 24-track analogue tape. There’s not a computer in sight”: How Flemming Rasmussen produced Metallica’s classic Master Of Puppets
James Hetfield [left] and Kirk Hammett harmonise solos as they perform live with Metallica in 1988. Hammett plays a Jackson Rhodes, Hetfield has his trusty white Explorer.
Artists "I remember showing up at 10 or 11 in the morning and working on solos and that leading to two or three o’clock in the morning the next day”: How Metallica beat the clock and battled fatigue to create a poignant and pulverising anti-war epic
The Collection: Kirk Hammett is a 400-page coffee table book documenting the Metallica lead guitarist's epic gear arsenal, telling the stories behind them.
Artists “The deepest-ever dive into the Metallica star’s eclectic guitar collection”: Kirk Hammett and Gibson Publishing team up for epic coffee-table book
Metallica frontman James Hetfield performs onstage in front of drummer Lars Ulrich, and plays his Ken Lawrence custom Explorer-style electric guitar, nicknamed "Sun".
Artists “I went for a guitar commission with a carload of basses! I laid them all out on the floor, and he went, ‘Okay, let’s make a guitar’”: Ken Lawrence reveals how he became luthier to James Hetfield and made some of his coolest Metallica guitars
Iron Maiden
Artists “It will excite anyone who loves a story of an underdog beating the odds to become and remain one of Britain’s biggest musical exports”: New Iron Maiden doc is on the way
Jackson Pro Series Lee Malia LM-87: The Bring Me The Horizon guitarist's new signature model is inspired by the Surfcaster and debuts a hunbucker/P-90 combo.
Artists “I feel like that song had everything we needed to come back with”: Bring Me The Horizon’s Lee Malia on Shadow Moses, its riff and the secrets behind its tone, and why it was the right anthem at the right time
James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett
Artists “We might just say, 'OK, let's go back to the '90s again.' It's not a bad idea”: Kirk Hammett says the next Metallica album could be a throwback to the Load and Reload era
  1. Artists
  2. Bands

The making of Metallica's Master Of Puppets

News
By Henry Yates ( Total Guitar ) published 3 March 2016

Behind the scenes of James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett's metal masterpiece

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Introduction: obey your master

Introduction: obey your master

Gravestones. Hundreds of them. Rising from the rotten grass, bedecked with the kit of fallen soldiers, each one with a thin silk line rising to a pair of bloody hands in the scorched skies. It was the kind of sleeve that stopped you in your tracks, but then Master Of Puppets was the kind of album that made time stand still.

The statistics, as they might be viewed by a record label bean-counter, don’t do it justice. Sure, Puppets was enormous, but Metallica would make bigger albums. The point is, they never made a better one.

This third record is a line in the sand between the gutter and the stadiums, and, if we’re honest, the reason we kept faith during the double-dip of Load and ReLoad, tolerated the hook-ups with the orchestras and squinted for greatness in St Anger.

It’s the connoisseur’s choice: the perfect mix of poise and fury, with the best songs from the band’s greatest line-up. Lars Ulrich might have been the quotable mouthpiece and Cliff Burton the classically trained whizz, but when it came to Master Of Puppets, it was James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett who were pulling the strings.

Don't Miss

Kirk Hammett and David Karon talk KHDK guitar pedals

Kirk Hammett on Metallica's Kill 'Em All

Robert Trujillo talks Jaco Pastorius, film-making and fingers

Page 1 of 7
Page 1 of 7
The thing that should not be?

The thing that should not be?

Before Master Of Puppets, Metallica were a joke. A good joke, perhaps, but certainly not a band to be mentioned in the same sentence as ‘world domination’.

Two albums had put the quartet on the radar and club circuit, and now they gurned from the foothills of the rock press – all spots, vests, denim and hair like wet straw. They were a mash-up of every hateful quality of the mall-rats in their San Francisco headquarters. For now, Metallica were not iconic, they were just moronic.

At their best, the four musicians had obvious talent, with 1983’s Kill ’Em All and 1984’s Ride The Lightning home to such classics as Seek And Destroy and Creeping Death. Nobody expected these songs to infiltrate the 80s mainstream, though, not least the band themselves, whose ambition appeared to stretch little further than living up to their nickname, Alcoholica. “We don’t mind you throwing shit up at the stage,” announced Hetfield at one show. “Just don’t hit our beers – they’re our fuel, man!”

To anyone who witnessed the post-show carnage, this was a band with permanent double vision. In fact, Metallica had their bloodshot eyes clearly on the prize, and by 1985, they were musically telepathic and ready to be taken seriously. “We were honing it on Lightning,” noted Ulrich, “and Puppets came the closest to a bullseye for that type of stuff.”

Page 2 of 7
Page 2 of 7
Big ideas

Big ideas

In hindsight, all the signs were there that Metallica were readying a grand statement. In contrast to the few days taken to bang out Kill ’Em All on a shoestring, Hetfield and Ulrich had crossed continents in search of the perfect studio, before familiarity and economics saw them return to Copenhagen’s Sweet Silence with Ride The Lightning producer Flemming Rasmussen.

Even more telling of the band’s broadening horizons was an apparent desire to create art, not noise. Where before Hetfield had screamed himself hoarse on vague themes, Master Of Puppets had a concept – “manipulation in all its forms,” was how Hammett saw it – and songs with sentiments, from the battlefield hell of Disposable Heroes to the broken ruminations of an asylum patient on Welcome Home (Sanitarium). “The idea for that came from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,” Hetfield told Guitar World, and combined with Hammett’s arpeggiated minor add9 intro, the result was deeply unsettling.

Lyrics were one thing; the real evolution was the way Metallica were now approaching their music. No longer were riffs tossed off like vodka shots. With sessions starting in September ’85, Puppets was their first record to be truly crafted, painstakingly assembled over five months. Hardly a lifetime by Axl Rose standards, until you considered that the music had been ready for months. “The only two songs that weren’t finished were Orion and The Thing That Should Not Be,” Hammett told Guitar World.

James is the best rhythm guitar player in the world by a mile

So the time was not spent on writing but on honing, with Metallica chasing down their signature brick-wall tone and squeezing every last drop of juice from the mixing desk. One song might feature up to 52 tracks, though it’s not always apparent, with Hetfield’s surgical precision letting him stack left, right and central rhythms that always sound airtight (some songs have more, while Battery and Damage, Inc sounded “a bit muddy”, and only have two).

“James is extremely exact,” Rasmussen told Metallica biographer Joel McIver. “He’s the best rhythm guitar player in the world by a mile. There’s no-one better than him when it comes to downpicking. It’s unbelievable. He’ll do eight tracks and it’ll sound like one guitar.”

Page 3 of 7
Page 3 of 7
Beyond thrash

Beyond thrash

Rock encyclopaedias concur that Metallica are a ‘thrash band’. Maybe so on full-throttle moments like Disposable Heroes and Damage, Inc, but spin Puppets next to, say, Slayer’s Reign In Blood, and you’ll find the former is far more melodious and experimental. Sometimes too much, felt the band.

“We felt inadequate as musicians and as songwriters,” Ulrich told McIver. “That made us go too far, around Master Of Puppets… in the direction of trying to prove ourselves: ‘we’ll do all this weird-ass shit sideways to prove that we are capable musicians and songwriters.’”

With respect, he’s wrong. It’s precisely this light and shade that keeps Puppets fresh while lesser thrash albums blur into a sea of galloping riffs. Take Battery: an opener that has the balls to start with weaving flamenco guitars, one laying down a four-chord bed in which the bass note rises by a semitone each change, before harmonised electrics swing in like a wrecking ball.

“The idea to make the intro to Battery so big evolved in the studio,” Rasmussen said. “There are tons of guitars on there and we just kept tracking.”

Battery is heavy as hell, but strangely light on its feet, with the time signature dodging between 4/4 and 5/4. And by the time Hammett had blazed a warp-speed legato solo in E minor, the tune had practically cracked the Earth’s crust. There’s no time to recover.

Without breath, Battery gives birth to the jaw-breaking title track, an anti-drug song that ironically sounds like a bad trip. Master Of Puppets is a guitarist’s paradise. First, there’s the doomy bedrock of thrash rhythms, played in E and F# using downstrokes, and made brilliantly hectic by Hetfield’s calling card of stabbing three notes ‘across’ the beat. “The riff was pretty messy,” he said, modestly, in Guitar World. “Constantly moving.”

[We were] trying to prove ourselves: ‘we’ll do all this weird-ass shit sideways to prove that we are capable musicians and songwriters’

But then, just as you have the song’s card marked, it throws a curveball with the love-it-
or-hate mellow section in which Hammett strokes out a sublime minor key solo, followed by the truly creepy ending, which has backwards guitar parts swimming through the mix.

“To get them I played a bunch of guitar parts that were in the same key as the song and laid them down on quarter-inch tape,” Hammett told Guitar World. “Then we flipped the tape over and edited it, so we had two or three minutes of backward guitar. We put it in the last verse.”

Puppets is a schizophrenic masterpiece, a song so good you’ll even forgive Hammett for fluffing a note in the first solo, where he pulls the E string clean off the fretboard of his Jackson Randy Rhoads V. It’s the only mistake that made the cut. “We heard it back, and I was like, ‘That’s brilliant! We’ve gotta keep that!’ Of course, I’ve never been able to reproduce that since.”

Page 4 of 7
Page 4 of 7
Classical heroes

Classical heroes

Disposable Heroes is even better. Arguably the album’s peak, it’s built on the telepathy of Hetfield’s super-tight Eb riffing and barked sergeant major vocals (“back to the front!”), and the oddball end-of-verse Hammett swells that, bizarrely, were inspired by attempting to mimic the bagpipes in old war movies.

Equally unlikely is Damage, Inc, a heads-down thrash juggernaut with an intro inspired by a long-dead German composer.

“I was into the whole Euro-metal thing,” Hammett told McIver, “and I used a few different scales. The Phrygian Dominant was the one that Cliff showed a lot of interest in. He used to watch me playing lead, trying to learn guitar licks and trying to snag bits and pieces of information. We would talk about theory and how it worked, just casual conversations about it.

Cliff told me that the intro to Damage, Inc is actually based on a Bach piece

“He loved theory and he loved classical music. He was a big fan of Bach. He told me that the intro to Damage, Inc is actually based on a Bach piece called Come Sweet Death, which was a little bit ironic in the wake of what would happen to him [Burton was killed in late 1986 when the Metallica tourbus overturned in Sweden].”

Page 5 of 7
Page 5 of 7
Masters of circuits

Masters of circuits

Respect to Rasmussen, and to the 20 fingers of Hammett and Hetfield, but let’s not forget the vital importance of gear in the Puppets sound. These were the years before the ESP signature models and active pickups, but there’s a case that the pair’s tone has never been more savage.

For much of this album, Hetfield was playing his iconic white Gibson Explorer (the standard ceramic humbuckers were replaced with EMG 81s in 1987), while the absurdly heavy The Thing That Should Not Be saw him turn to a Jackson KV1 and down-tune for the first time.

His watertight distortion was achieved not with FX – “the last time I used a distortion pedal was on Ride The Lightning,” he noted in 1992, “and it was hell!” – but from the molotov cocktail of a Mesa/Boogie Mark II C+ rewired as a preamp, and a 100-watt Marshall power amp with 4x12 cabs.

On lead, Hammett was more relaxed about effects, favouring an Ibanez Tube Screamer and a Dunlop Cry Baby, and fell back on his old axes, including a Gibson Flying V (either ’74 or ’78) and a Fernandes Strat copy with a Floyd Rose.

Like Hetfield, he was also in thrall to the fusion of Mesa and Marshall. “Boogie made those heads for a short time in the mid 80s,” he told Guitar World. “There’s something about Boogie Mark II C heads that was really unique and very individual in their gain stages and sound. Most of Master Of Puppets was tracked with Boogie heads and Marshall heads combined.”

Page 6 of 7
Page 6 of 7
The memory remains

The memory remains

If the gear setup was slim by modern standards, then the promotional campaign for Master Of Puppets was positively emaciated. There were no hit singles to reel in radio listeners. No music videos to offer the nascent MTV.

It’s hard to believe it now, but Puppets never actually climbed any higher than No 29 and No 41 on the US and UK charts. Yet the band stood strong by their creation. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, this is a fucking great album’,” Hammett reflects. “‘Even if it doesn’t sell anything, it doesn’t matter to me because this is such a great musical statement.’”

But the boulder was rolling. Puppets started selling and never stopped, riding a word-of-mouth buzz that grew louder as Metallica crossed America on a six-month Ozzy Osbourne tour shortly after the album’s release. By 2003, it had shifted six million units. Not bad for an album that was troubled, awkward and divisively brutal.

“Maybe Master Of Puppets was the record that a lot of the early fans identified with,” Hetfield told McIver. “There’s still an innocence about it and just a real ‘fuck you, world’ attitude to it.”

So Metallica had it all. The album of their careers. A legendary line-up firing on all cylinders. An adoring fanbase and an international market with its jugular exposed. For this one-time ragbag of no-hopers, everything was working out. Then the tour bus pulled away on the Damage, Inc Tour, towards the fateful stretch of motorway north of Ljungby, Sweden, and it became clear that some higher puppet-master had other ideas…

Don't Miss

Kirk Hammett and David Karon talk KHDK guitar pedals

Kirk Hammett on Metallica's Kill 'Em All

Robert Trujillo talks Jaco Pastorius, film-making and fingers

Page 7 of 7
Page 7 of 7
Henry Yates
Stay up to date with the latest gear and tuition. image
Stay up to date with the latest gear and tuition.
Subscribe and save today!
More Info
Read more
Flemming Rasmussen
“All the albums I did with Metallica were recorded on 24-track analogue tape. There’s not a computer in sight”: How Flemming Rasmussen produced Metallica’s classic Master Of Puppets
James Hetfield [left] and Kirk Hammett harmonise solos as they perform live with Metallica in 1988. Hammett plays a Jackson Rhodes, Hetfield has his trusty white Explorer.
"I remember showing up at 10 or 11 in the morning and working on solos and that leading to two or three o’clock in the morning the next day”: How Metallica beat the clock and battled fatigue to create a poignant and pulverising anti-war epic
The Collection: Kirk Hammett is a 400-page coffee table book documenting the Metallica lead guitarist's epic gear arsenal, telling the stories behind them.
“The deepest-ever dive into the Metallica star’s eclectic guitar collection”: Kirk Hammett and Gibson Publishing team up for epic coffee-table book
Metallica frontman James Hetfield performs onstage in front of drummer Lars Ulrich, and plays his Ken Lawrence custom Explorer-style electric guitar, nicknamed "Sun".
“I went for a guitar commission with a carload of basses! I laid them all out on the floor, and he went, ‘Okay, let’s make a guitar’”: Ken Lawrence reveals how he became luthier to James Hetfield and made some of his coolest Metallica guitars
Iron Maiden
“It will excite anyone who loves a story of an underdog beating the odds to become and remain one of Britain’s biggest musical exports”: New Iron Maiden doc is on the way
Jackson Pro Series Lee Malia LM-87: The Bring Me The Horizon guitarist's new signature model is inspired by the Surfcaster and debuts a hunbucker/P-90 combo.
“I feel like that song had everything we needed to come back with”: Bring Me The Horizon’s Lee Malia on Shadow Moses, its riff and the secrets behind its tone, and why it was the right anthem at the right time
Latest in Bands
Dire Straits Brothers In Arms
"Everybody was going 'Does anybody know how to work this thing?'”: How Guy Fletcher and a classic ‘80s synth became Dire Straits’ secret weapon on Brothers In Arms, and helped to turn it into one of the biggest albums of the decade
Billie Eilish
Fresh from covering Radiohead, Billie Eilish has now tackled a Coldplay classic on her Hit Me Hard And Soft Tour (and it's not the first time she's sung it)
Nick Banks performing with actual Pulp in 2023
"Can you believe this?": Watch Pulp drummer Nick Banks join tribute band Pulp’d at Fake Festival
Status Quo Performing in Hyde Park, 2001
“We used to work with Fleetwood Mac a lot on the uni circuit. You could sit down beside the stage and they’d start playing - der-der, der-der - for an hour and a half. We wanted to do that”: Francis Rossi on how Status Quo developed their 12 bar boogie
Guy Garvey in 2008
“We threw strings at the track and it exploded”: How a pop anthem turned into a wedding song favourite
Liam and Noel Gallagher
"This is very much the last time around”: Make the most of the Oasis reunion says the band's co-manager
Latest in News
Frank Zappa in a top hat
"Window or aisle, how would you like to return home?": Dweezil Zappa on how his dad ran his band
Bruce Springsteen performs during the first night of 'The Land of Hopes and Dreams' tour at Co-op Live on May 14, 2025 in Manchester, England
“In my country, they’re taking sadistic pleasure in the pain they inflict”: Springsteen issues rallying cry against Trump at Manchester gig
microlab mk3
Arturia upgrades its MicroLab MIDI keyboard with new keybed, sustain input and USB-C - and slashes the price
Dire Straits Brothers In Arms
"Everybody was going 'Does anybody know how to work this thing?'”: How Guy Fletcher and a classic ‘80s synth became Dire Straits’ secret weapon on Brothers In Arms, and helped to turn it into one of the biggest albums of the decade
Fortin Fourteen Dual Boost Overdrive: the new tricked-out green stompbox from Mike Fortin packs two Tube Screamer OD flavours in one housing and is packed with features.
“Each of the three modes represents a milestone in pedal history”: Fortin triples down on modded-TS tones with the Fourteen – an boost/overdrive pedal representing the “apex of Mike Fortin’s modification philosophy”
Andy Bell and Liam Gallagher 2005
“I’m in and I’m really looking forward to it”: First non-Gallagher member confirmed for Oasis reunion line up

MusicRadar is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site.

  • About Us
  • Contact Future's experts
  • Terms and conditions
  • Privacy policy
  • Cookies policy
  • Advertise with us
  • Accessibility Statement
  • Careers

© Future Publishing Limited Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA. All rights reserved. England and Wales company registration number 2008885.

Please login or signup to comment

Please wait...