This is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen: a bass tablature book for Metallica’s …And Justice for All album, a record that (in)famously has bugger all bass on it. I’ve no idea how good it is or isn’t (our host finds it kind of dubious), I just think it’s conceptually hilarious.
The story of how and why the bass vanished from the album varies a bit, but Steve Thompson, one of the engineers, describes it as beginning with Lars Ulrich bringing in his preferred EQ settings for his drums. These were duly applied and Thompson thought they sounded like shit, so he remixed everything to what he thought they should sound like, Lars objected to the results and told him to turn the bass down until it was hard to hear. Then turn it down even further. Thompson thought everything sounded like shit now, but did as he was instructed. As he says, they were the artists, not him, even if they didn’t know what.
James Hetfield has also said the way his guitar was recorded (i.e. with no mid-range) meant Jason Newsted’s bass playing clashed with his sound cos he was largely doubling Hetfield’s guitar and the two instruments were hard to distinguish. Hetfield’s also more recently said that what really happened was, they didn’t turn Newsted down so much as they turned everything else up. Whatever it was, I don’t believe them when they say they weren’t just being cunts to the then-new band member, who I don’t think anyone could’ve blamed if he’d quit as soon as he heard the final mix.
But there’s one odd thing about this video, i.e. when it mentions isolated bass tracks being available in the Guitar Hero game. Cos I’ve seen another video with Steve Thompson where he says the AJFA multi-tracks are so riddled with edits and splices (which I always thought was generally considered a no-no with multi-track tapes) that they’re probably unplayable now. Someone else says in the comments there’s no fewer than five AJFA songs available in game format… so if the tapes are unusable, where are the isolated bass tracks coming from?