Teemu Mäntysaari speaks about Megadeth recording “Ride the Lightning”

Megadeth guitarist Teemu Mäntysaari discussed Dave Mustaine’s choice to include his rendition of “Ride the Lightning,” the title track of Metallica’s 1984 album for which Mustaine received a co-writing credit after leaving the band in 1983, on the band’s final album, simply called “Megadeth,” in a recent interview with Jimmy Kay of Canada’s The Metal Voice, as per Blabbermouth. When asked how he felt when Dave told him he wanted to record “Ride the Lightning” with Megadeth, Teemu responded as follows.

I’ve been asked a lot about this, like you can imagine… Well, I think it was only after we had recorded the [‘Megadeth’] album that I actually saw those interviews [with former Megadeth bassist David Ellefson] and headlines that Dave had been talking about this before with the previous formations of the band and they somehow didn’t wanna do it. But I don’t think I knew this before when we went into this process. But when Dave told us about the idea, we were definitely all in and wanted to do it and thought that it’s a great idea to kind of pay homage to Metallica, of course, but on the other hand also celebrate Dave’s part in writing these classic songs with Metallica.

I knew the song beforehand — I had played it before — and it was really interesting to get Dave’s little insights to how he thought about those riffs when he was writing them back in the day. And we could try to make it a little bit more like modern Megadeth-sounding version of this song — that’s what we aimed at — and still keeping all the rawness and all the vibe of the original, pretty much. We tried changing few things here and there, but we didn’t wanna stray too far from the original version. We tried — at one point the solo section we extended a little bit more and then we let it be for a couple days and then we listened back and then we were, like, ‘Ah, this somehow sounds wrong’ because you know the song so well already. So then we went back to the original arrangement pretty much, but we made it a little bit faster. We modified little things here and there, like some drum fills, a little bit of the solos we, of course, made out in our own touch. And, yeah, I love how it came out, and it seems like the fans really like it too. So I’m happy we did it.

Teemu made this statement after Kay pointed out that the guitar solo in Megadeth’s rendition of “Ride the Lighting” is nearly “note for note” identical to that of Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett.

Yeah. The bigger lines are pretty much — the ideas of the original, which, I guess, some of those are also original Dave ideas and some are original Kirk ideas or — I don’t know — James [Hetfield and] Lars [Ulrich] ideas. But, yeah, we wanted to keep the main melodies, but, of course, if you really go into the note level, you’ll realize that there’s some things that are slightly different. Like the tapping part that I start with, I tap it slightly differently than Kirk does. And when then Dave comes in, he plays some of the licks between the slower parts, the faster parts he plays a little bit with his own fingering and own touch, of course. So it’s not copied exactly note for note.

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