Since breaking onto the metal scene with a cover of Metallica’s Enter Sandman – which, at the time of writing, has been viewed a whopping 26 million times – The Warning, composed of Daniela “Dany” Villarreal Vélez, alongside her sisters Paulina and Alejandra, has been going from strength to strength.
With four studio albums under her belt, Villarreal Vélez showcases her standout guitar riffs on the trio's latest effort, 2024's Keep Me Fed, and demonstrates how she continues to change things up with alternate tunings.
“Some of the riffs in this album [are] a complete mind game, for sure,” she admits in an interview with Guitar World. “Talking about mind games, look at this,” she says, referring to her Fender Baritone Stratocaster.
“It is a baritone guitar, but I have it dropped as well. So the last string is not in B, it's all the way down to A. For some reason, I always looked at this guitar as a seven-string guitar without the first string. So I don't tune it like a normal guitar, and that's gonna come and haunt me at one point in my life, I'm sure.
“The second string doesn't have that semitone difference as a normal guitar. So if I play a chord, it's not gonna sound like a chord. I don't recommend you to do that, but for me, it works. Apparently, I just learned how to use the guitar like this.”
If this intrigues you, Villarreal Vélez continues spilling the beans on her go-to alternate tuning on this guitar, before launching into Sharks, “one of the heaviest” tracks on the album.
“So it's A, and then E, all the way down to A, again, D, then I go to a G, instead of a G flat or F sharp, and then a normal B,” she explains. “So this, this is the string that is the weird one that should not be in G, but I am a little bit stubborn, so that's how I use it, and that's how I got used to it.”
Villarreal Vélez and her sister Alejandra recently looked back on their journey – from posting covers on YouTube to playing dates with the likes of Guns N' Roses , Muse, and the Foo Fighters – in an exclusive chat with Guitar World.
