Death Metal (Tampa Bay)

Chuck Schuldiner formed Mantas in Altamonte Springs in 1983. Same year, Trey Azagthoth founded Morbid Angel in Charlotte before moving to Tampa. They weren't responding to anything—no thrash scene to reference, no punk lineage to draw from. Just garages in Central Florida, working in isolation.

The infrastructure came first. Jim and Tom Morris opened Morrisound Recording in 1981 at 12111 N. 56th St. in Temple Terrace, a Tampa suburb. Early clients included Savatage, a progressive metal band. Nothing about the studio screamed “extreme music.” But the Morris brothers understood drum triggering and PC electronics when most engineers thought speed metal was technically impossible to capture. They spent hours getting drum sounds heavy enough to cut through distorted guitars. Scott Burns joined mid-1980s and found most thrash productions “sounded like shit.” Nobody gave death metal bands proper recording technique. He learned through trial and error, developing methods for blast beats and tremolo picking.