What Did IMMOLATION Tune Down To On Dawn Of Possession? They Had No Idea

Immolation‘s 1991 debut album Dawn Of Possession is undeniably a death metal classic, and one that’s tuned to C standard as so many metal records are. Not that Immolation knew that when they were writing and recording the record.

In a pretty funny excerpt from the new Immolation book Into Everlasting Fire: The Official History Of Immolation, both vocalist and bassist Ross Dolan and guitarist Robert Vigna looked back on having not a single clue what their instruments were tuned to.

“We didn’t have tuners,” laughs Dolan. “So, when we would come to the rehearsal room and if I played something and it sounded weird, Bob would say, ‘You’re out of tune.’ So, I’d say, ‘Hit your E string.’ He’d hit his E string and I’d tune to him, but he wasn’t tuned to E.”

“We didn’t really know what we were tuned to,” picks up Vigna. “I knew how to tune the guitar itself, and we could all tune our instruments, but never really paid attention to what key we were in. We knew we wanted to make things heavier, so we probably just tuned down more and more as time went on, not realizing just how much we did. That being said, whatever it was that I was tuning to, that’s what it was. When we went to the studio, [producer Harris Johns] is like, ‘Okay, here, use this tuner and we’ll figure it out’.”

“He asked us what we tune to,” says Dolan. “We were like, ‘We tune to Bob.’ He was blown away. Then, he went and got a proper tuner, got Bob to plug into it so we could see what Bob was tuned to and we learned that we were tuned to C standard. So, C standard is equivalent to Bob. We were very green and none of us owned a tuner. As long as we were in tune with each other, we figured everything would be fine.”

Into Everlasting Fire: The Official History Of Immolation was written by longtime extreme metal journalist Kevin Stewart-Panko (Do You Have Anything to Declare?), features a foreword by Deadguy guitarist Keith Huckins, and boasts stunning new art from legendary Immolation cover artist Andreas Marschall. Get it here.