![\"James](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/James-Hetfield-Metallica-2022-Far-Out-Magazine-1140x855.jpg\")
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(Credits: Raph Pour-Hashemi)<\/p>\n
Wed 18 March 2026 5:00, UK <\/p>\n
There are hardly any metal bands in the world that could manage to compete with what James Hetfield<\/a> does with one guitar. <\/p>\n Aside from writing some of the greatest riffs that the metal world has ever seen, the fact that he can get through a song like \u2018Master of Puppets\u2019 while downpicking the entire thing is the kind of feat that makes you wonder whether he\u2019s actually a musician or a musical mutant of some kind. No one else can have that kind of machine-like accuracy, but there were always ways for Hetfield and the rest of his band to be challenged whenever they took a few chances.<\/p>\n Hell, even if they never got out of San Francisco, Cliff Burton was already the one helping show them the ropes of music theory. Burton was never a snob about music and wasn\u2019t even the biggest metal fan in the world, but since he had a deep love of all things classical, it wasn\u2019t hard to find him throwing in a few harmonies into their songs or eventually using several tracks to put together one of the most beautiful bass breaks of all time on \u2018Orion\u2019.<\/p>\n But a lot of the complexity that those songs had almost came together by accident. \u2018Master of Puppets\u2019 is still one of the strangest songs to count because of how they stop the main riff during the verses, and while they weren\u2019t exactly virtuosos when they started, And Justice for All is about the closest that they were ever going to come to making a prog-rock album, complete with time signature changes on nearly every song.<\/p>\n It\u2019s all well and good to make rock and roll songs that bend the fabric of the genre, but after they went mainstream with The Black Album<\/a>, it was going to be a lot more difficult for them to change things up. They had legions of fans that got on board with softer songs like \u2018The Unforgiven\u2019 and \u2018Nothing Else Matters\u2019, and while Load and Reload had their fair share of complex moments, it\u2019s not like they were going to make a grand opus in between their radio hits.<\/p>\n Or at least, that\u2019s what everyone thought. Because when you look through the band\u2019s output in the late 1990s, every single record seemed like a new learning experience. And since they had reached the point where they could pretty much do whatever the hell they wanted, why not try out a few tracks with an orchestra behind them? That\u2019s what Burton had been working towards with rock instruments, but when Hetfield started jamming with the orchestra, he felt more than a little bit intimidated.<\/p>\n