Sure, there's been plenty of memes over the years replacing a snare drum with a garbage can or beer keg to get that Lars Ulrich St. Anger drum sound. But the fine folks over at Reverb have actually provided a real sample pack that'll let you get all that pingy Metallica goodness without even a hint of a joke.
You can download the St. Anger drum pack here, which was played by Jessica Burdeaux and recorded by Noam Wallenberg at Chicago's Rax Trax Recording. Lars' backwards hat and bleached hair is not included.
Oh, and don't worry – despite all the jokes, Ulrich still stands behind his St. Anger drum tone 100%. In a 2020 interview, Ulrich made it abundantly clear that the St. Anger snare tone was an intentional choice and that he wouldn't change a thing.
"I stand behind it a hundred percent, because at that moment, that was the truth," he said. "Just my personality, I'm always just looking ahead, always thinking about the next thing. That's just how I'm wired. Whether it's Metallica always thinking ahead, or in my personal life, or in relationships, whatever I'm doing, I'm just always thinking ahead. Sometimes, arguably, I spent too much time in the future, but I rarely spend any time in the past. And so the only time this stuff really comes up is in interviews.
"I hear St. Anger. That's a pummeling and a half, and there's a lot of incredible, raw energy, and it's, like, 'Whoa!' It's been slapped around a little bit. But the snare thing, it was like a super-impulsive, momentary… We were working on a riff. [James] Hetfield was playing a riff in the control room. And I ran up. I was, like, 'I need to put a beat behind that.' I ran into the tracking room and sat down and played a couple of beats over this riff to not lose the energy of the moment, and I forgot to turn the snare on. And then we were listening back to it, and I was, like, 'Wow! That sound kind of fits that riff, and it sounds weirdly odd and kind of cool.'
"And then I just kind of left the snare off for the rest of the sessions, more or less. And then it was, like, 'Yeah, that's cool. That's different. That'll fuck some people up. That sounds like that's part of the pummeling,' or whatever. And then it becomes this huge, debated thing. And sometimes we'll kind of sit on the sidelines and go, like, 'Holy shit! We didn't see that one coming,' in terms of the issue that it turns into."
