LAMB OF GOD Guitarist Talks About The Creation Of The 'Redneck' Riff

Mark Morton of Richmond, Virginia's LAMB OF GOD recently spoke to Ed Mitchell of U.K.'s Total Guitar magazine about writing the riff for the song "Redneck" off LAMB OF GOD's 2006 album "Sacrament". A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Total Guitar: Where did the inspiration for the "Redneck" riff come from?

Morton: "I was trying to incorporate some blues-influenced, Southern swagger into metal. I was thinking about some of the older music that I'm into, like LYNYRD SKYNYRD and THE ALLMAN BROTHERS; taking that mixture of pentatonic blues and chromatic passing notes and fusing it into a metal riff. That's where my head was at."

Total Guitar: Do you remember the "birth" of the riff?

Morton: "I had introduced the song 'Descending' when we were writing for the 'Sacrament' album [2006]. I fought for it, and it wound up being a pretty well respected and popular song, but initially within the band that song wasn't wildly popular. So I remember thinking the next one I rolled in with had to be a firecracker."

Total Guitar: So you brought in "Redneck"?

Morton: "Yeah. I was sitting in my den before practice and I still hadn't come up with anything. We start practice around noon and it was about 10 in the morning. I was playing the guitar, seeing what I could come up with, and within an hour or so I had written 'Redneck'."

Total Guitar: Did the recording of "Redneck" go as smoothly as the writing?

Morton: "Machine, our producer on that record, took a liking to the song and really wanted to make sure everything went down the way he thought it should. Everything went smoothly. It usually does for us. We don't tend to hit a lot of snags in the studio."

Total Guitar: What gear did you use to record the riff?

Morton: "The guitar I used on it was my '75 Gibson Les Paul Goldtop. That's pretty much my studio guitar. As for amps, the Mesa Boogie Mark IV is our mainstay but on that album we did a lot of re-amping through amp modellers and that kind of stuff. I can't remember which filters we ran through. That's more of a production and engineering issue. On the 'Wrath' album [2009] we used Mark IVs, but on 'Sacrament' there was a lot more of the digital stuff going on."

Read the entire interview from Total Guitar magazine.