At the time when he studied at the school, he formed a group, called Avenged Sevenfold, with his mates. Numerous sources point out that he learnt to play a guitar when he was just 13. At that time, he founded his first band Society Down that played music in the genre of crust punk. After both groups broke up, he ventured to found another band called Mad Porno Action, or simple MPA. However, neither of those groups was successful then, and it led to the emergence of Zacky’s nickname. This way significantly changed his entire biography. Perhaps one of his favorite quotes, directly connected with the vengeance, is the following: “the best revenge is bettering yourself.”

Vengeance in his nickname implies revenge to all those people, and there were quite a lot of them, who did not believe in his success and doubted his potential. He even made up a nickname “Johnhy Christ” for his band mate, while claiming that it suits him very well. He also came up with the creation of A7X, an abbreviation for Avenged Sevenfold.

Then, the group started to gain popularity and win its fans since it has not stopped coming up with new hits. The group also took advantage of their brand, and they, in particular Zacky Vengeance, produce specifically tailored guitars. Zacky also launched a series of clothing under the brand “Vengeance University”, and it includes belts, hoodies, and T-shirts. He cooperates with such labels as Good Life Recordings, Hopeless, and Warner Bros. Dressed in the patented graphic tees and tattoos, this beautiful looking man, symbolizes Goth meets metalcore, to eternity. There are five members in his band including himself. Their band has a very dramatic image. After the death of their drummer, James Sullivan, the band continued with the help of former dream theatre drummer, Mike Portnoy.

Currently, his band only consists of two members, Shadows and himself. ‘Shadows’ has been with him since the day he founded Avenge Sevenfold! The band has been categorized under many genres of heavy music. Mainly categorized as heavy metal, hard rock, progressive metal and metalcore, Avenged Sevenfold's music has evolved over most of the band's career. At first, the band's debut album Sounding the Seventh Trumpet consisted almost entirely of a metalcore sound; however, there were several deviations from this genre, most notably in "Streets", which shows a punk rock style, and "Warmness on the Soul", which is a piano ballad. On Waking the Fallen, the band displayed a metalcore style once more, but added more clean singing and leaned a bit more towards metal and bit less close to hardcore. In the band's DVD All Excess, producer Andrew Murdock explained this transition: "When I met the band after Sounding the Seventh Trumpet had come out before they had recorded Waking the Fallen, M. Shadows said to me 'This record is screaming. The record we want to make is going to be half-screaming half-singing. I don't want to scream anymore. And the record after that is going to be all singing'."