Gaetano Loffredo of Italy's Spazio Rock recently chatted with SHREDDING THE ENVELOPE's Dave Reffett about life, music and how metal will never die. The following is an excerpt from the interview:

Q: Shredding The Envelope seems to wink at all the guitar fans: is this release dedicated to them or simply to all heavy and thrash metal listeners?

A: "I would say that this album is my love letter to hard rock and heavy metal and what it has done for me and given to me in my life. It's an amazing record and it gets me pumped every time I hear it.

Q: It is mixed and mastered very well... if METALLICA's Death Magnetic had a production like this... would you like to talk about that?

A: "I am one of the minority's out there, I guess that thought; Death Magnetic sounded pretty damn cool. My favourite Metallica record is And Justice For All so, for me, I love that they went back to that kind of style. The guy that mastered my record is George Marino, who did pretty much all of their albums including tons of stuff by AC/DC, KISS, OZZY, GUNS N' ROSES, so for me he is the man. Had they used him on Death Magnetic perhaps it would have been even better because George Marino is the best in the business. Metallica had that record mastered at the same facility as my record, just with a different engineer. But like I said I love that album. I heard that Rick Rubin had the mixes frozen so the engineer in his defense didn't have a lot of wiggle room to move with it. Sonically, that album definitely has that over compressed sound but some people love that you know, so it's apples and oranges really. For me personally it's a cool record, but just pushed way too much to the max sonically. But that doesn't take away from the songs at all for me on that one. But take an old record like DIO's Holy Diver for instance, which George Marino mastered. In terms of volume it's not as loud right out of the gate as most new records are today, so you have to turn it up, but when you do it sounds fucking great. It has room to breath and you can really take in all the dynamics and stuff. Which is what I think people responded poorly to about Death Magnetic, because the clean parts would are soft then some of heavy jam out parts can almost make your ears bleed."

Read the full interview at this location.

A new edition of Guitar World's Betcha Can't Play This video guitar lesson series, this time featuring Dave Reffett, can be viewed below: