Sonic Sounds
 

For anyone who plays guitar or knows a thing or two about SY pedals and effects. Anyone know how I customize pedals or even what pedals to use to get a sonic sound.

1. alternate tunings
2. loud amp (tubes preferred)
as far as pedals lee uses his Ibanez ad80 (they resently reissued the ad9 which will be a lot cheaper) delay pedal and his digitech (discontinued look on ebay) one alot. basically a delay that osculates will be good for dist they have used the russian big muffs a lot in their career. i would say a delay, a russian big muff and a rat. but the tunings and volume are most important

Sounds are already sonic by definition so... what?


(ah, the sonic youth sound, silly me)

www.sonicyouth.com/mustang/eq

Will tell you everything you could possibly ever want to know about Sonic Youth's equipment.

haha thank you!

Well...that just talks about the guitars. I'm currently working on a guitar to hopefully mimic a SY sound....heh.

the basic thing to sonic youth's sound, as they talk about in interviews, is that they used shitty guitars, guitars which were basicallyhopeless and nearly useless. They would alter them, tweak them, fuck with them, until the guitar did something that they thougth sounded cool,a wail, or a ringing, or a screech, or a fucked up feedback sustain. then they would write songs to fit those guitar noises.

so I suggest you get yourself some shit guitars, and go to town on them, alter them, stick fucked up shit in em, put the strings on backwards and tune them like a viola.

NO!
check out the parts dedicated to each musician , that go like this:

 

all about amps, effects, blah

the site gives you good info on what they use, but god knows what they did to alter it (amps, guitars etc.)

whoops.

pedals don't really matter as long as you have an alternative tuning, a cranked up amp and a guitar with good pickups and you'll get close to that sound.

you just need feel.

Chorus pedal would be essential also.

I guess, not big on gear.

The tuning is 80% of the sound. Yeah, I suppose they used crap guitars early on but all of the Jazzmasters they use on stage are worth about 5K each.

Please don't think you are going to sound remotely like them with a pawn-shop guitar.

I thought most of their jazzmasters were AVRI. Thurston's F#F#F#F#EB jazz is a Japanese one. Also, SY don't use chorus pedals. the chorus like sound comes from their weird tunings.

You could easily find an old harmony electric on ebay for less than $100. that tuned weird running through an overdriven tube amp will be close to the SY sound before they started using effects.

I think they used Jaguar guitars, didn't they?