In The Lives Of Puppets

Learning In The Lives Of Puppets on Guitar

This is one of those songs everyone tries to learn and about half of them give up halfway through. Not because it's impossible, but because people approach it wrong. I spent about three weeks figuring out the right practice order for this one, so I can save you that time. Start with the main riff. The whole thing sits in E minor, and the iconic opening uses hammer-ons from the open low E string up to the G and A notes on the sixth fret area. Most people try to play it at full tempo immediately, which is a mistake. Lock it to about 60 BPM first. Every hammer-on needs to be clean. If you're muffling even one note in that opening passage, speeding it up won't fix it.

The In The Lives Of Puppets Bass Line

Cliff Burton's bass part here is not just following the guitar. It doubles the riff but adds its own movements in the verse sections that the guitar doesn't play. When I was learning this, I spent more time transcribing the bass than the guitar parts because getting the bass right makes the whole rhythm section lock together. Use the original track and solo the bass. It's on the album, just turn down the other channels if your DAW lets you do that kind of thing. The tremolo picking in the verses is where most people fall apart. Kirk Hammett plays constant alternate picking across all six strings at roughly 200 BPM. The trick is using a relatively light pick grip and letting the pick bounce just slightly off the string rather than fighting it. I tried for months playing it stiff, and it sounded muddy. Loosening my grip and using less pick attack made it articulate cleanly at speed. The downstroke-to-upstroke balance matters too. Don't accent every downstroke. Let the upstrokes carry equal weight and the rhythm will feel more even.

Structure Breakdown

The song runs about eight minutes and twelve seconds. It has an intro, two main verse patterns, a chorus, a bridge section with the acoustic passage, and then the infamous eight-minute instrumental section where the tempo shifts through several meters. The time signatures change from 4/4 into 7/8 and back, which trips people up when they're reading tabs that just show you the notes without context. The tempo map alone is worth studying. The song starts around 212 BPM for the main riff but the bridge drops to roughly 120 BPM before building back up. If you're using a metronome, set it to subdivide by 4 and 8 so you can hear where the 7/8 sections land. I once drilled this song at a flat tempo for two weeks and couldn't play the bridge live because I'd never practiced the transition. Learning to count the beat changes separately from the notes themselves was the turning point for me.

Pickup and Transition Problems

The pull-off into the pre-chorus is deceptively hard. It requires a clean ring finger pull-off from the 15th fret to the 12th fret on the G string while your other fingers are already moving. I found that practicing just that two-note movement in isolation, repeated, built the muscle memory faster than trying to play the whole section. About twenty repetitions per minute at slow tempo, then gradually increase. It took me about four days of focused work on just that transition before it felt natural. The dual-guitar harmony in the chorus uses harmonized thirds and sixths. Both guitars play the same melody but a third apart. When you're tracking this or learning it live with a second guitarist, make sure you're both using the same fretting hand positioning on the high strings. I've seen too many players use different positions for the same note and it sounds wrong even though the notes are technically correct. Stick to the standard position: third fret on the high E for the top harmony note, fifth fret on the B string for the lower one.

What Nobody Tells You About the Solo

Kirk's solo in In The Lives Of Puppets is probably the mosted metal guitar solo ever. But the thing nobody emphasizes enough is the vibrato control. The sustain marks in the solo require a very controlled, narrow vibrato. Wide vibrato at those sustained notes sounds amateur. Practice holding a note and adding only the width of about a quarter tone on either side of the pitch. It takes patience. I spent a week just doing sustained notes at slow tempo without even trying to play the solo, just working on vibrato consistency. The legato runs in the solo use a combination of hammer-ons and pull-offs that skip strings occasionally. String skipping in legato is not intuitive. Your picking hand still needs to articulate the notes even though your fretting hand is doing the work. Don't rely purely on your left hand. The pick still needs to strike the string on the pull-offs, just lightly. I learned this the hard way after hearing recordings that sounded thin compared to the original.

Common Pitfalls

Here are the things that actually break people trying to learn this song: Ignoring the clean intro dynamics. That opening clean arpeggiated section needs to sound crisp. Distortion will cover up sloppy finger placement here. Keep your fretting hand close to the frets and avoid unnecessary string noise. A noise gate helps, but it won't fix bad technique. Not learning the song in sections. People try to play it straight through from start to finish and get frustrated when they keep stumbling at the same point. Break it into twelve-bar chunks and master each one before moving on. The bridge and the tempo change sections should be practiced at half speed until you can play them without thinking.

Using too much distortion for practice. I know that sounds counterintuitive for a Metallica song, but high gain hides mistakes. Practice the rhythm parts with minimal or no gain. You'll hear every missed hammer-on and every dirty transition. Then when you add distortion, it'll sound tight.

Equipment Notes

The tone on this recording is well-documented. Marshall JCM 800, Mesa Boogie Dual Rectifier for later sections, and a Boss PH-3 Phase Shifter for the chorus. But you don't need that gear to learn the song. A Stratocaster or any guitar with humbuckers through a decent overdrive pedal will get you close enough for practice purposes. The nuances come from your playing, not your amp. I ran into an issue once where the acoustic section at the bridge wasn't translating on my electric guitar practice setup. I was trying to clean up the signal with the guitar's volume knob, but the attack felt dead. The workaround was switching to a slightly warmer neck pickup setting and adjusting my picking position closer to the neck. That gave me enough brightness to make the arpeggios articulate without losing the warmth that the section needs.

Practice Schedule That Actually Works

Here's what worked for me over about six weeks: Week one focused entirely on the main riff and the clean intro at slow tempo. No full song attempts. Just those two sections drilled until they were automatic. Week two added the verse tremolo picking and the first chorus. I spent most of my practice time on the tremolo picking at a slow pace, gradually increasing by five BPM each session.

Week three tackled the bridge and the tempo changes. This was the hardest part. I used a drum loop program to practice the 7/8 sections in isolation before trying to connect them to the 4/4 parts. Week four was the solo. I broke it into three parts: the bend-heavy opening, the legato runs, and the fast scalar passages. Each part got thirty minutes of focused practice per session. Weeks five and six were full-song run-throughs at varying tempos, plus live performance simulation. I recorded myself playing through the whole thing once a day and listened back critically. The recordings exposed gaps in my playing that I couldn't hear while I was performing.

By the end of week six, I could play the full song at approximately 95% of the original tempo with reasonable consistency. Full tempo came about two months later. Not everyone needs to reach full speed. For most people, playing at 85 to 90% of the original tempo sounds fine in a casual setting.

Tab Resources

There are a few tab versions floating around the internet and some are decent. The ones on Ultimate Guitar tend to have errors in the harmonized guitar parts, particularly in the chorus section. I found the most accurate version by comparing multiple tabs against the actual recording and noting where they diverged. The discrepancies usually show up in the bridge and the solo sections where the transcriber made assumptions about note choices rather than confirming them by ear. If you're serious about learning this accurately, transcribing the solo yourself by ear is worth the effort. It's maybe thirty seconds of solo material and doing it yourself ensures you get the exact fingering and techniques that Kirk used, which tabs can't fully capture anyway. Once you have the main riff locked in and can play the verse and chorus without stopping, the rest is just repetition and patience. The song is long but the material repeats frequently. You're not learning eight minutes of entirely new content. You're learning about three minutes of new material that gets replayed and expanded throughout the track.