Senna Okafor 
Store vinyl records upright, in a cool, dry room kept at roughly 65-70°F (18-21°C) and 40-55% relative humidity, with every record in an anti-static inner sleeve and a protective outer sleeve. Learn how to store vinyl records properly and a shelf of a few hundred LPs will still play cleanly decades from now; get it … Read more
Learning how to start a metal vinyl collection comes down to three things: pick a handful of albums you already love, learn how to spot a playable copy before you pay for it, and set a budget you can keep. Buy records in the order you will actually play them, check the pressing on Discogs … Read more
Scales shape metal solos in two ways: they fix the set of notes you are allowed to play, and the intervals between those notes decide the colour you hear. The same six notes can sound like a thrash run, a death metal lead or a power metal melody depending on which tones you stress, how … Read more
To improve alternate picking accuracy, slow down until every note is clean, then raise the metronome by 1 or 2 BPM at a time. Alternate picking accuracy means hitting exactly the string you meant to hit, exactly once, on exactly the beat, while the pick hand alternates down-up-down-up without extras. Most players try to fix … Read more
Sweep picking is how metal guitarists play fast arpeggio runs without the picking hand stalling at every string change. One continuous pick motion covers two, three or four strings, the pick attacks each string exactly once with even volume, and the fretting hand rolls its fingers onto the shape as it arrives. The reason it … Read more
Learning how to transcribe a metal solo comes down to one habit: work in short phrases, start well under the recorded speed, and write down what you hear before you try to make sense of it. Most of the difficulty is not the guitar playing, it is the distortion smearing pitch, the palm mutes swallowing … Read more