Musical Style
Merrill crafts a sound that’s as soulful as it is cutting—gravelly, but with a clear high-end sheen. Some of that clarity comes from a relatively new technique at the fore of his tone equation: fingerpicking. Robbie tried playing with fingerpicks at the suggestion of his tech during the band’s last tour and has decided to use them exclusively, using Dunlop Clear "D" plastic fingerpicks on his plucking-hand index and ring fingers. "At first I hated the feel, but once you get over the hump of not feeling the string beneath your finger, you eventually don’t even realize they’re on and you come to feel the strings again," he says. For Merrill, fingerpicks provide the best of both worlds. "When you play with your fingers, it’s harder to get the consistent sound from a pick hitting the string. With fingerpicks, I can get that sound but still keep that fingerstyle."
When Merrill sees bands, it bums him out when he can’t hear what the bass player’s doing. When Godsmack first started, he had a ratty sound just to blend with the guitars. Over the years, he has refined it.
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“The difference between style and taste is never easy to define, but style tends to be centered on the social, and taste upon the individual. Style then works along axes of similarity to identify group membership, to relate to the social order; taste works within style to differentiate and construct the individual. Style speaks about social factors such as class, age, and other more flexible, less definable social formations; taste talks of the individual inflection of the social.”
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