Bands Like Korn: The Downtuning Thread

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Most "bands like Korn" lists compare moods. This one compares machinery, because Korn's sound was never a mood: it was a specific set of technical decisions made in Bakersfield in the early 1990s and pressed onto a debut album, Korn, released 11 October 1994 on Immortal/Epic. Seven-string guitars tuned down a whole step to A. A five-string bass with the mids scooped out until it clicked like a drum. A rhythm section that thought in hip-hop time rather than thrash time. Producer Ross Robinson capturing all of it raw at Indigo Ranch in Malibu. Every band on this page carries at least one piece of that package, and the fastest way to find your next record is to pick the piece you actually love.

One disclosure before the list: this site belongs to the team behind Daemon Grey, a Canadian industrial goth metal artist, and he is not on this page, because he is not an honest answer to this particular question; his own corners of the map live in the guides linked along the way.

The Korn Package: Three Technical Choices

First, the guitars. James "Munky" Shaffer and Brian "Head" Welch took the seven-string, an instrument built for virtuosos, and tuned it down a whole step to A standard (A-D-G-C-F-A-D), turning the low register into texture and threat rather than shred. Munky has explained it plainly in a rig rundown: dropping the whole guitar a step "makes the low B an A". The choice became so identified with the band that Ibanez's K7 signature model shipped factory-tuned to it. Second, the bass. Fieldy's five-string Ibanez K5, tuned A-D-G-C-F with the midrange rolled off, produces that clicking, percussive attack that sits on top of the guitars instead of underneath them: bass as a lead instrument. Third, the rhythm logic, with grooves built on space and bounce borrowed from hip-hop rather than the straight gallop of 1980s metal. The package even has peer review: Jonathan Pieslak's article "Sound, Text and Identity in Korn's 'Hey Daddy'" (Popular Music 27, no. 1, 2008) is a rare musicological close reading of a nu metal song, examining pitch, timbre and text in a track from Issues (1999). Pieslak notes that most metal scholarship studies the subculture rather than the songs themselves, which is roughly what most similar-bands lists do too. So here is the songs-first version: who carries each piece of the package, and where they took it.

Deftones: The Seven-String Divergence

Deftones took the same instrument and drove it somewhere completely different. Stephen Carpenter moved to seven-strings in the Around the Fur era and used the extended range not for bounce but for atmosphere: huge, blurred chords under Chino Moreno's melodies. By Diamond Eyes (2010) he had gone further down, writing the whole record on an eight-string. If what you love in Korn is the physical weight of the low register, Deftones are the band that proved the same weight could be beautiful. Start with Around the Fur, then Diamond Eyes for the eight-string era. The two bands' shared history and diverging paths get a full page in our guide to bands like Deftones.

Slipknot: The Percussion Overload

Slipknot inherited the rhythmic half of the package and multiplied it. Where Korn implied percussion through Fieldy's clicking bass, Slipknot made it literal: three players hitting things, over guitars working in drop-B territory (the Iowa album tuning is documented as B-F#-B-E-G-G#, its low string sitting a step above Korn's A). The result keeps Korn's downtuned bounce but replaces its queasy restraint with total assault. Start with the 1999 self-titled debut. The masks, the nine bodies and the element-by-element breakdown of who carries what belong to our Slipknot page.

Mudvayne: The Bass-as-Lead Inheritance

Nobody inherited Fieldy's central idea, bass as the front instrument, more completely than Mudvayne. On L.D. 50 (released 22 August 2000 on Epic), Ryan Martinie tuned his five-string to F#-B-F#-B-E and treated the instrument as the band's melodic and percussive centre: slaps, taps, ringing double-stops and arpeggios threaded through odd-time riffs. Guitar World has credited him with redefining metal bass playing for a generation, and the difference from Fieldy is instructive: Fieldy stripped the bass down to pure rhythm; Martinie built it back up into a virtuoso voice without losing the groove. If the click is your favourite part of a Korn record, start here, with "Dig".

Sepultura: The Borrowed Tuning

The downtuning thread runs backwards too. In 1996, Brazil's Sepultura, already a decade into a thrash and death metal career, recorded Roots with Ross Robinson at Indigo Ranch, the same producer and studio behind Korn's debut. Max Cavalera has said the band "borrowed the Korn tuning" for the record, sinking their groove into the same low register, and Jonathan Davis himself guests on the track "Lookaway". Roots (Roadrunner, 1996) is what the package sounds like when it is bolted onto Brazilian percussion and hardcore fury instead of Bakersfield dread: heavier, earthier, and the clearest proof that Korn's technical choices travelled between genres almost immediately. Start with "Roots Bloody Roots".

Limp Bizkit: The Hip-Hop Rhythm Section

Limp Bizkit, formed in Jacksonville in 1994, took the third piece of the package, the hip-hop rhythm logic, and made it the whole point. DJ Lethal arrived from the rap group House of Pain and put actual turntables where Korn had only implied them, while Wes Borland ran seven-string Ibanez guitars through art-school imagination, and the rhythm section of John Otto and Sam Rivers swung where other metal bands stomped. Rivers, the band's founding bassist and one of the most fluid players of the era, died in October 2025 at 48; the grooves he cut on Three Dollar Bill, Y'all$ (1997) are the place to start, before the singles made the band a culture war. If Korn's bounce is what moves you, this is its loudest descendant.

Fear Factory: The Precision Lane

Fear Factory show what the same instrument does under opposite intentions. Dino Cazares was detuning a six-string ESP to B standard when Ibanez approached him in 1996, during the Demanufacture era, about their seven-string Universe model; he switched for the better string tension and kept it through the Obsolete years. But where Korn tuned low to loosen and unsettle, Cazares tuned low to tighten: machine-gun picking locked sample-accurate to the kick drum, the industrial end of the downtuned spectrum. If you want Korn's register with none of its slack, start with Demanufacture (1995) and hear the same low B serving a completely different god.

Meshuggah: Where the Low End Went Next

Follow the thread past nu metal and it arrives in Sweden. Meshuggah pioneered the eight-string guitar in metal, working in a tuning built on low F (F-Bb-Eb-Ab-Db-Gb-Bb-Eb, with drop-F variants), a fourth below Korn's A. The intent is different again: not bounce, not atmosphere, but polyrhythmic architecture, riffs that cycle against the drums in long mathematical loops. The whole djent movement (Periphery, Vildhjarta and hundreds of bedroom producers) descends from this choice. Meshuggah are not a nu metal band and would likely wince at the shelf placement, but they are the logical end of the same question Korn asked in 1994: how much music is hiding below E? Start with obZen.

Tallah: The Revival Carriers

The package is now old enough to have heirs. Pennsylvania's Tallah, tagged by Metal Hammer as leading the charge of the new wave of nu metal, run the full kit: downtuned riffs, a turntablist, vocals that flip between rap cadence and scream, and a rhythm-first ethos underlined when Max Portnoy (son of drummer Mike Portnoy) moved from drums to bass for their third album, Primeval: Obsession // Detachment (Earache, September 2025). Matt Karpe's Nu Metal: A Definitive Guide (Sonicbond, 2021) maps how broad the original movement was; Tallah are the current-generation band treating that map as living territory rather than nostalgia. Start with the new record and work backwards.

The Package, Band by Band

Band	Piece of the package	Low-end territory	Start with
Korn	The whole package, 1994	A standard, seven-string	Korn (1994)
Deftones	Seven-string weight as atmosphere	Seven-string, then eight	Around the Fur
Slipknot	Rhythm multiplied into assault	Drop-B territory	Slipknot (1999)
Mudvayne	Bass as lead instrument	F#-B-F#-B-E five-string	L.D. 50
Sepultura	The tuning, borrowed outright	Downtuned groove	Roots
Limp Bizkit	Hip-hop rhythm logic	Seven-string	Three Dollar Bill, Y'all$
Fear Factory	The low register, precision-locked	B standard, seven-string	Demanufacture
Meshuggah	The low end, taken further	Low F, eight-string	obZen
Tallah	The whole package, revived	Downtuned, turntablist intact	Primeval: Obsession // Detachment

For the movement these bands built, wave by wave, the nu metal parent guide is the parent page of this one.

Frequently Asked Questions

What tuning does Korn play in?

Korn play seven-string guitars in A standard: A-D-G-C-F-A-D, the whole instrument tuned down a step from a seven-string's usual B standard. Munky has described it as dropping the low B to an A. Ibanez's K7 signature model shipped from the factory already tuned this way. Fieldy's five-string bass matches at A-D-G-C-F.

What bands sound like both Korn and Slipknot?

Mudvayne are the strongest answer: downtuned riffs and odd-time aggression close to Slipknot, with a percussive, up-front bass straight from Korn's blueprint. Tallah cover both at once in the current generation, pairing downtuned bounce and a turntablist with harder, scream-driven vocals. Sepultura's Roots era sits near both as well.

Who produced Korn's first album?

Ross Robinson produced Korn's self-titled debut at Indigo Ranch in Malibu; it was released 11 October 1994 on Immortal/Epic and peaked at number 72 on the Billboard 200. Robinson then brought Sepultura to the same studio for Roots in 1996, spreading Korn's downtuned approach almost immediately.

Do bands like Korn use seven-string guitars?

Many do. Deftones' Stephen Carpenter adopted seven-strings in the Around the Fur era and later moved to eight. Fear Factory's Dino Cazares switched to an Ibanez seven-string in 1996 after detuning six-strings to B. Wes Borland played seven-string Ibanez guitars in Limp Bizkit, and Meshuggah pushed on to eight-strings entirely.

Sources

• Jonathan Pieslak, “Sound, Text and Identity in Korn’s ‘Hey Daddy’”, Popular Music 27, no. 1 (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 35–52. Record
• “How Korn Reshaped Seven-String Guitars For Nu Metal”, Tedium (2023).
• “How Ryan Martinie redefined metal bass playing for a new generation with Mudvayne”, Guitar World.
• “Roots by Sepultura: The Complete Story”, Riffology.
• Matt Karpe, Nu Metal: A Definitive Guide (Sonicbond Publishing, 2021). ISBN 9781789520637.