In the latest episode of the Jaxxon Podcast, M. Shadows of Avenged Sevenfold had a chat about the band’s career. In a clip of the interview, shared by the channel, Shadows recalls their former drummer The Rev recording their first album in a single take. He explained:
“Now at the time, we didn’t know that most drummers recorded to a click track. We weren’t used to that, we didn’t know what it was and at the time Donnell [Cameron] never brought it up. So The Rev, to his credit, he was like ‘Well, I know how to play these songs, I’m just gonna play them one time.’ So we start recording like it’s not normal, right? Like, you want to get in there, you want to get it perfect.”
He went into further detail on how the drums for the first album were recorded:
“Now he was such a great drummer, it didn’t really matter at that time and he played like, six songs and we were like… I mean we have no comments so we just kept going. Then by the end of it, he’s like, ‘I’m gonna do this whole record in one take. I’m gonna make sure I don’t have to go back and redo anything.'”
M. Shadows then realized what could have been different. He said:
“Now there’s a couple things in the record he probably should have redone but to him, it was all about not redoing anything, but if you listen to that record it just shows the ability of this 18-year-old kid that could just ‘slay’.”
Starting with no knowledge about the music industry and recording like every other new band, M. Shadows, earlier in the interview, mentioned the first time he was in the studio with the band to record their debut album:
“The very first record ‘Sounding The Seventh Trumpet’, we were super green, we didn’t know how to record, we didn’t know anything about any of it. We just knew our favorite bands recorded somehow, and so we ended up getting hooked up with Donnell Cameron who had done a bunch of Blink [182] records, Bad Religion records, No Effects record at a place called Westbeach Recording Studios. We were kind of taking his lead.
‘Sounding The Seventh Trumpet’ was the first step of their career, and though Shadows now realizes there were many mistakes, he still thinks the album came out ‘cool’. He said:
“But you know if you were to take it nowadays and go like ‘Okay, it’s not on a click track, the tempo’s all out of time, there’s all sort of things you guys are doing that was very green’, but it’s also kinda cool, it’s kinda punk-rock, it’s like rad; it’s like, ‘who cares?‘ It sounds cool.“
Before passing away due to an accidental overdose, The Rev played in the first four studio albums, ‘Sounding The Seventh Trumpet’, ‘Waking The Fallen’, ‘City Of Evil’ and ‘Avenged Sevenfold‘. The track ‘Fiction‘, from their next album ‘Nightmare‘, was written by The Rev, being his last song.
If you want to find out more, you can see the full interview here, or watch the short clip down below.
