10 Famous Musicians Who Just Do The Same Weird Thing Every Time
3. Playing Songs In E Minor - Metallica
Something more technical for you now, and a few facts to start you off.
1) Metallica want to write big, crunching, catchy metal riffs for their songs. 2) It is considerably easier to do this in E Minor than it is in other tunings. 3) Kirk Hammett and James Hetfield are, by no stretch of the imagination, the most accomplished guitarists in the industry. While that might should like a potshot, 1 + 2 + 3 has, quite famously, produced some of the greatest riffs in music history. Is it formulaic? Yes. Does it work brilliantly for them? Yes, also.
Some additional science for you. Before the invention of the seven-string guitar, E was the heaviest, lowest, crunchiest, most evil, most metal note you could get out of a standard guitar. This means that songs starting there sound more menacing and dark than songs that don't. Metallica had a distinctive sound in mind, so made the E Minor chord the foundation of virtually everything they wrote.
Even their solo work began to follow a similar formula, with Kirk Hammett feeling incredibly comfortable in the Pentatonic scale of E Minor, playing virtually everything in it since about 1992. So much so, that while improvising brand new solos on their latest release, he played the exact same riff on Atlas Rise that he'd written years earlier for Suicide & Redemption.