Shoegaze
A style defined by a dense wall of guitar effects, with heavy reverb and delay, tremolo arm use and quietly sung vocals buried in the mix.
Shoegaze treats the guitar as a source of texture rather than of riffs or solos, layering delay, reverb, fuzz and modulation until individual notes become difficult to pick out. Players use the tremolo arm constantly, bend chords out of tune deliberately and let effects create the movement that would otherwise come from the writing. The technique is less about speed than about control of sustain and the ability to shape a sustained sound over several bars.
Example: A song whose guitar is a single enormous washed-out chord with dense reverb and delay, and an indecipherable vocal, is shoegaze.
See also
Related
- PageReverb
- PageShimmer reverb
- PageDelay
- PageAmericana
- PageBebop
- PageBluegrass
- PageAaron Dessner
- PageAce Frehley