Blackened - Acoustic Metallica Cover 

UPDATE, July 29th 2024. You, yes you, the listener. You are amazing. This video was created almost 8 years ago and has been up on this particular channel for almost 5. For reasons completely beyond my understanding this cover version has proven to be incredibly popular in the last month or so. The views have quadrupled, the comments have been unfailingly positive and yeah, I don't know what else to say except THANK YOU to everyone who's taken the time to listen/Jeff
Re-up from 2016.
Blackened was the very first acoustic cover in the Big Four series. I came up with the idea in early 2016, and originally wanted to do the entire song and include every single guitar part; riffs, harmonies, solos etc. I soon realised that because of the slower tempo, recording the entire song would've meant the recording would be about 9 minutes long. Even at 6 minutes it goes on a bit too long, but yeah, I cut parts out and condensed the arrangement to something more approachable.
Of course there's no way I could've played Kirk's solos anyway so cutting them was a no brainer.
Blackened is a powerful, well written song. It was pretty neat to hear Metallica's own, acoustic take on it, because parts of that version sounded a bit similar to my arrangement. Plus it's always absolutely hilarious when Metallica try to swing.
Disclaimer: RU-vid has unilaterally decided to occasionally show ads before my videos even though 1) my channel isn't monetized or even eligible for monetization and 2) these cover versions have not been flagged for copyright which means songwriters and/or publishers don't make any money from the ads either. I strongly disapprove even though RU-vid and Google have every right to do this.