CANNIBAL CORPSE's ALEX WEBSTER Reveals Scariest Guitar Scale

The February issue of Metal Maniacs features an interview with CANNIBAL CORPSE bassist Alex Webster about the band's new album, "Evisceration Plague", and the legendary diminished fifth. Excerpts from the conversation follow below.

Metal Maniacs: What's the darkest scale in metal?

Alex Webster: Believe me, we've asked ourselves that question… I would say that the scale we use the most, because we have found that it can be used in a way that makes the darkest and most sinister-sounding riffs, is the diminished scale, which is a half-step, whole-step; or, it could be whole-step, half-step. I guess you would call it a symmetrical scale as opposed to a more traditional church mode diatonic kind of thing like major/minor. Any scale we can, we'll mess around with and try to find a way to make it sound dark, but a diminished scale is pretty much guaranteed to sound dark. We tend to keep going back to that one a lot.

Metal Maniacs: Why do you think that is?

Alex Webster: It's the intervals. What makes music sound dark is the order that you put the notes in; if they're played together, they sound a certain way. Like when you play a major third, it generally sounds happier than a minor third. A diminished scale has both of those in it, so if you're trying to make stuff dark, you have to beware of implying a major tonality; but it also has the triton — the diminished fifth — which is the darkest-sounding interval you're going to find. It has minor thirds in there, major sixths, which are inverted minor thirds — you're dealing with a lot of the darker-sounding, more mysterious-sounding intervals. It just lends itself to death metal. If some musicologist ever cared to study our band or other death metal bands, they'd probably just see that scale popping up all over the place, because it works so well.

Metal Maniacs: Is that the scale that's used in "Black Sabbath" by BLACK SABBATH?

Alex Webster: Yeah, I mean it's a diminished arpeggio, I guess you could say — "Bomp Boomp BAAA" — there's the root, the octave and then it goes to the diminished fifth, the third note; it's a root diminished fifth octave arpeggio basically, in that song. It's gotta be one of the most, if not the most evil-sounding riffs in metal history, and it's the song that kind of ushered in the dark side of rock…

Metal Maniacs: I hope we aren't getting too technical here. But it is very interesting…

Alex Webster: Honestly, as much as CANNIBAL CORPSE is a band known for controversial lyrics, artwork and that sort of stuff, what we're really focused on is music. We're probably more of a musician's band than a lot of people would think at first glance. Get me started talking about intervals, scales and rhythms and things like that, it'll take a while to get me to stop.

The February issue of Metal Maniacs is on sale January 27.

For more information, go to www.metalmaniacs.com.