Fractal Audio powers Metallica on Howard Stern, Sirius XM

I've always been curious about Jame's TriAxis rig.

He always had 4 TriAxises... TriAxi?... in his main rack for years. Two active, two for backup, and a hidden pair of Mesa 5-band EQs in there. Also, one of his TriAxis units was modded, stickers on it say "phase reversed IIC+".

I own a TriAxis and another preamp and have played through them stereo, and I can tell you that the IIC+ channel is out of phase with the other drive channels in that preamp. This tells me that James used the two TriAxis preamps at the same time, either in stereo or blended together, and one of them must have been set to the IIC+ and the other one must have been set to another high gain mode in the preamp. There's no other reason for one of the preamp's IIC+ channels to be modded for phase reversal.

Anybody know how James ran that rig exactly? It's something I've been wondering about on and off for quite a while now.

I want to say he never used two triaxis with gain at once.
One Clean, One Crunch, and backup for each
Even when using JC's or Line 6 multi effects rack for clean I think he still blended cleans from triaxis

Without looking it up I recall around 2003 it was Triaxis+Krank

But Shortly after and since then it was Triaxis+Diezel together

I do have to say if you frank Dynamic Voice all the way up- it gets you SAD BUT TRUE
 

I highly doubt we ever see any of Metallica's actual presets get released. Besides, they would be dialed in very specifically for the gear they use, so they wouldn't even sound the same. Unless of course you have some Meyer speakers kicking around.
 
There used to be a preset pack right here on this forum that replicated Metallica tones so perfectly on Axe FX 2 that you'd swear it's the recording even with me playing, and I'm by no means Hetfield. I don't know where the author did his tonematches from, but that was by far the best preset pack I've ever played. I don't know if it was re-released for AxeFX 3, but if it was, might be worth checking out.
 
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