Fans Want Whitechapel’s Tubes Untied

Whitechapel are bigger now than they’ve ever been before: their most recent album, Our Endless War, sold 16,000 copies and entered the Billboard Top 200 at number ten last month. That’s a major accomplishment for any metal band in this day and age, let alone one as heavy as Whitechapel. The reception for this album, obviously, has been overwhelmingly positive.

So something tells me the fellas in Whitechapel ain’t gonna take this too seriously, but: Gear Gods reports that a fan named Tony Burke from Farmville, VA has launched a petition calling for the band to re-record War‘s guitars “with raw, real, tube amps.” Mr. Burke and his supporters feel that the band has “fallen victim to the Fractal Axe-FX/Kemper generic, digital, boring sound” as a result of “using digital amps.” He’s quick to point out that he has no issues with the drums, and he never even mentions Phil Bozeman’s vocals — its just the guitar sound with which he takes issue.

Like I said, I think it’s about as likely that we’ll learn Cliff Burton has become The Tooth Fairy as it that Mr. Burke will get his wish, especially given that, as of this writing, he only has thirty-eight signatures on the petition — up from five signatures when Gear Gods broke the story yesterday afternoon. Still, our sister website made a very strong argument as to why this petition is nonsense:

“…would you have known that the guitar tones were generated by a Kemper Profiling Amp if the “making of” videos didn’t spell it out for you? Honestly? Because I call bullshit on that. This is subjective, but I think the recording is a vast improvement over the band’s last record, drum and guitar tones alike. And if anything the guitar tones are less hyped in the highs and lows than what I’ve come to expect from the realm of polished modern metal. There’s nothing that would convince me that the amps were modeled besides the video evidence. How could anyone be sure that what you’re hearing isn’t just the nature of the mic or the preamp, the mixing job or the mastering?”

So while Whitechapel’s war may be endless, their guitar recording sessions for these have very much reached their conclusion. Sorry, Tony.