Synyster Gates

Synyster Gates — Brian Haner Jr., born in 1981 — is Avenged Sevenfold's lead guitarist, and the member whose training least matches the band's genre of origin. The son of guitarist Brian Haner, he studied jazz guitar at the Musicians Institute, and that is what explains his solos. Where 2000s metalcore called for speed and aggression, Gates builds phrases with complex harmony, altered scales and jazz-rooted phrasing executed at metal tempo — a combination audible in "Bat Country", "Afterlife" and "Beast and the Harlot", and one that had virtually no parallel in the scene the band came from. That distance between his vocabulary and the repertoire's is the group's productive tension. Alongside Zacky Vengeance's rhythm guitar, which holds the structure, Gates occupies the role of the unpredictable element, and the twin-guitar harmonies the band has used since City of Evil (2005) are an openly declared inheritance from Iron Maiden, filtered through that training. He joined the group while still a teenager, in time for the first album, and is on the whole discography, from Sounding the Seventh Trumpet (2001) to Life Is But a Dream... (2023).