‘I Played a Metallica Record as an Example of What I Thought Was Wrong’: Rick Rubin Reveals Key to Producing Slayer’s ‘Reign in Blood’

“There’s no punctuation; it becomes a blur.”

Rick Rubin reflected on producing Slayer’s “Reign in Blood”, recalling how he used Metallica’s music to explain to his engineer why he believed the existing conventions for rock production were “wrong” for thrash metal bands.

Having made his name via his work in the hip-hop world, the world-known producing guru had zero experience when he came to work on Slayer’s seminal 1986 LP, “Reign in Blood”. The thrash giants’ third record, which ended up redefining speed and heaviness for a whole generation of metalheads, ended up being as a major argument in favor of Rubin’s truant approach to his craft.

During a recent conversation with Rick Beato, Rubin said he immediately noticed how the standard approach to producing rock or metal wouldn’t work in the case of Slayer, and recalled how he tried to present his case to engineer Andy Wallace by using Metallica as an example (transcription via Rock Celebrities):

“I had a theory. This [was] not based on being a musician [or] being a technical person. This is based on being a fan and… just thoughts. So, when I hear very fast music like Metallica, the sounds are big, like on rock records. The whole thing gets blurry, and you can’t really hear [the] fast tempos. If the music you’re playing is fast and if the sounds are big, there’s not enough space for those big sounds to happen next to each other. There’s no punctuation; it becomes a blur.”

“I played him a Metallica record as an example of what I thought was wrong and I said, ‘Would it be possible to record in such a way that it was hard-sounding but everything was short, because it’s fast and we want there to be this?’ I didn’t want it to be a blur of bass, I wanted it to be a pulse.”

Rubin, who also eventually came to produce Metallica’s 2008 LP “Death Magnetic”, said last year he was only able to give Slayer the right treatment exactly because he had no prior experience with heavy music:

“With speed metal, if you treat it like Black Sabbath, it won’t do what Slayer does – in that case, Slayer is they play super fast. And the nature of things that are fast is, they come very close together, like the kick drums are super fast. When you listen to Led Zeppelin records, the drum goes [slower]. So if you have someone playing [fast], and you treat it like Led Zeppelin, it’s just going to be a blur and noise; you won’t hear any of it.

“That’s what was happening up until ‘Reign in Blood’ – and this is really in each case. It comes from my lack of experience. Lack of the ‘right way’ to do it. The ‘right way’ to record rock drums is the way Led Zeppelin did it. But in my mind, not if you’re Slayer.

“So in some ways, because I wasn’t experienced enough to know ‘this is how you do it’, I’m listening to it for what it is, and it’s this very precise type of thing. And you want to hear the precise tightness of it. And up until that point, no one had recorded it that way.”