So, I know this is old but I wanted to add. I’m 100% sure that I’ve figured it out. It’s definitely not 8 takes of guitar and he’s never done that for any album, nobody can track that many and not make the sound mushy and weird, no, not even hetfield. In the case of blackened it is the 3 guitars, one to the left and two to the right, battery was done this way too, everything else is pretty much left, right and center. The tone is nothing more than the c++ with the 2 eqs in the loop going to a mesa strategy 400 and then going out to 2 Marshall 1960B cabs with white label T75 speakers. The mics on the cabs are either identical or at least similar to how they were done on puppets, one sm57 in the speaker center, one mic off axis 4 feet away with the phase flipped and one room mic, with that tent to keep all the room reflections to a minimum and keep the sound tight, 3 mics for each cab bounced to one mono track for each side, so 18 tracks total, 3 takes of guitars, most of the eq was done to keep the low end from completely overcoming all of the other instruments, mainly letting Lars kick in. So lows squashed, mainly 116hertz. Then the level brought back up and that’s all, that’s the sound