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Bring in bass player Reginald Quincy “Fieldy” Arvizu with his tuned-down bass, and Korn’s signature sound was born.

“This was just what I was craving,” Shaffer said. “I was just fulfilling a creative craving that I wasn’t feeling. And, then Fieldy has his five-string bass and then the seven-string and we tuned down and that was it, that was our sound.”

Since its inception, Korn’s sound has evolved, but the band deliberately took a drastic left turn with its 10th studio album, “The Path of Totality,” released in 2011. Later, the return of Korn co-founder and guitarist Brian “Head” Welch, who left the band in 2005 and returned in 2013, began to turn the band back to its original style on its 2013 release, “The Paradigm Shift,” according to Shaffer.

A follow-up album is expected to be released this fall. It is the longest period of time that Korn has taken to release a new record.

“I’m very proud of the album,” Shaffer said of the forthcoming release. “If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be letting it out later this year. … It was a long process, that’s for sure. We started writing music over a year ago, and we’re still just finishing it up. It’s probably the longest time we’ve taken to make a record.”

Expect this one to be more guitar-heavy, thanks to the collaboration of Shaffer and Welch, but not a duplication of Korn’s earlier music.

“To go back and remake your first two albums, it’s not going to happen,” Shaffer said. “Musically, we’re so much more evolved with our songwriting. When I listen to those first two records, the great thing about it is we didn’t know what we were doing, and that’s the beauty of it. We didn’t know verse and the chorus, and maybe we should put a bridge here. We didn’t know any of that. We were like, let’s do this part and put this part here. And that’s why those records are great, because there’s innocence in that aggression, if that makes sense, in the songwriting anyway, and now we just feel like better songwriters that need to expand.”

Audiences will most likely get a sneak peek of the new music this tour.

“I’m thinking, yes, as long as we have everything prepared and rehearsed some of the new songs and we’re feeling confident,” Shaffer said. “And yeah, I think you can hear one or two this summer and in the fall for sure.”