Synyster Gates on Avenged Sevenfold’s new album: “by far” their most guitar-centered effort

In a recent interview with Brian Ball of Ernie Ball, Synyster Gates explains that Avenged Sevenfold‘s latest album, “Life Is But A Dream”, digs deeper into the use of guitar more unconventionally, layering guitars to make huge, not-quite-guitar-like sounds.

In Gates’ words:

Having all this time to experiment with a really, really big sound library and getting on maybe the keyboards first or the little ROLI keyboard that makes all the crazy different sounds and playing through a myriad of effects – the Axe-FX by Fractal [Audio] is an amazing, amazing tool – there was endless sources of inspiration in the last five years, and that was kind of by design. And because of the time that we had to set up all these different playgrounds, these sonic playgrounds, to really experience and build new scenes that we hadn’t heard before.

It’s, by far, the most guitar-centric record that we’ve ever done. By far, leaps and bounds. But ostensibly, it’s not just coming at you with loads of guitar. To me at least, it doesn’t have that aesthetic. To me, it’s deeper. But we were able to get that effect with a lot of fucking guitar. And I’m super proud of that. At this point, I have no interest in picking up a guitar just for the sake of writing a record. It has to be like, ‘I don’t know why I walked into my fucking creative room, I don’t know why I’m in my studio right now, I’m just moving and shit’s coming out and I’m pleased.’ That’s it.

You can watch the original video interview below: