Is it just me, or are things getting stupid with the shoegaze pedals?

[blacktiger]

While I’m yelling at clouds, when the eff did ambient/shoegaze/drone become popular enough that companies are releasing an endless stream of expensive pedals aimed directly at that demographic? That’s a serious question. I feel like Rip Van Winkle; I slept for 20 years (or more) and woke up in a different world. When I was in college, I would joke about entering the school’s talent competition and playing 15 or 20 minutes of solo feedback/noise/drone guitar to a dumbfounded and, eventually, hostile crowd. Some dude could probably get a standing ovation these days for lugging a pedalboard on stage and “exploring sound” for 10 minutes. I’m not gonna lie, it’s a bit disorienting and disconcerting. Kind of feels like when punk “broke” in the US in the early ‘90s. It’s really weird when the stuff people used to think you were a weirdo for enjoying suddenly becomes mainstream. A few years ago, one of my wife’s co-workers, who is about 10 or 15 years younger than us, was like “your husband was into punk and skateboarding in the 80s? That’s cool” and I was like “it sure didn’t feel cool when grown-ass men were physically threatening me when I was like 10 or 11 for wearing a Sex Pistols pin, or a few years later when people drove by my friends and I skating and yelled ‘SKATEFAGS!’ at us.” For the record, I DID walk to school uphill both ways while carrying an armful of punk records and a skateboard with a backpack full of delay and reverb pedals.

[redchapterjubilee]

Let me yell at clouds with you. I find that there’s lots of new pedals that are great for fooling around and making amazing noises that I’m not clever enough to figure out how to use in a song. But I am very conservative when it comes to effects pedals.

[blacktiger]

Let me yell at clouds with you. I find that there’s lots of new pedals that are great for fooling around and making amazing noises that I’m not clever enough to figure out how to use in a song. But I am very conservative when it comes to effects pedals.

That’s me 100%. I bought an EHX Attack Decay after watching videos of the cool stuff people were doing with it, but once I got it, I realized that I couldn’t really do much with it other than some swells and reverse sounds, which were cool and fun, but nothing I could really work with. I’m a little shocked when I hear people talking about “drawers full of pedals.” I currently own 9 pedals, total (and 3 are listed for sale on Reverb), and rarely play through more than three at once.

[windmill]

Anyone know why are these pedals being released now ?

Is there a shoegaze revival going on ?

[MrShake]

Anyone know why are these pedals being released now ?

Is there a shoegaze revival going on ?

I'm out of touch, but the last moment I remember it having was circa 2007-2010, so it's possible.

My weirdo theory is that the pedal industry is actually driving the shoegaze interest. They ran out of Tube Screamer and Fuzz Face clones and had to up their game to keep people interested, driving people to dabble in what "inspired" these pedals, with collector fervor being the gasoline on top of the market.

I just got back from band practice. Lots of strobes and drones and fuzz and Krautrocky beats. Maybe that has me prickly again about all this. But seriously, the pedals themselves are fine. They're tools. Use them or don't and no judgement if you wanna spend a week just perfecting "Machine Gun" or whatever.

[hulakatt]

Is there a shoegaze revival going on ?

Yes. It's pretty sizable and doing well.

[sal paradise]

Almost every new indie band has got a dream pop kinda spin to it. Chorus & reverb are back & sneaking into really mainstream stuff.

Soccer Mommy’s latest album is a good example- and I can name about 15 other bands/songwriters who have a similar sound.

Then there’s the Yumi Zouma/Alvvays/Barrie sounding bands who’ve got that synthy vibe but more guitar driven.

And the ambient sounds in hardcore haven’t gone away. Turnstile have just exploded with an album lathered with reverby, chorus guitar sounds that they’ve been doing since 2012. And there were grunge influenced sounds of Title Fight, Basement, Daylight & a million other bands, too. A lot of whom now sound like post-hardcore dream pop bands (pianos become the teeth etc)

[s_mcsleazy]

i don't like it but i get it.

basically for the longest time, if you wanted to know how to get that "shoegaze/dreampop" sound, you had to put in the effort. i remember 15 or so years ago being like "how did they get THAT guitar sound" then going through forums and photos trying to figure out what pedals they used. especially that infamous photo of kevin's pedalboard that was going around at the time. also given how infamous kevin was for a long time about giving interviews, i think it created this mythology of "oh this pedal's on there and it's quite cheap, maybe that's one of the keys to the sound" which pushed up the prices of the pedals he used. also i feel the love that shoegaze started getting in the late 00's didn't help either. the amount of memes about shoegaze/dreampop/post-rock pedalboards is almost as large as the actual pedalboards.

nowadays, we kinda know how a lot of it was made and companies are willing to try making a pedal that does the majority of the heavy lifting in one box. bands are wanting to add elements of these genres into their music. i think it's cool that the sound has filtered down but i am kinda at the point where it's growing a little stale.

[blacktiger]

basically for the longest time, if you wanted to know how to get that "shoegaze/dreampop" sound, you had to put in the effort. i remember 15 or so years ago being like "how did they get THAT guitar sound" then going through forums and photos trying to figure out what pedals they used.

In the late ‘80s/early ‘90s, it was all guesswork. I had no damn clue. I wanted my guitar to sound like a string section, which was one of the reasons dream pop and shoegaze clicked so hard with me. It was kind of the sound I had in my head. I had no damn clue how to get it, though. Reverb? Somehow that never dawned on me, even though I had a stand-alone reverb unit and reverb on my amp. I also had a multi-effects unit (a Korg or a Roland, I think), but if it had one of those patches, I never stumbled on it. In the end, I used lots of delay stumbling over itself and feedback to get close to that sound (not very close, really). In some ways, that actually made things more interesting. People had different sounds because they had no idea how to hone in on one specific sound. A.R. Kane loved the Cocteau Twins, but their music was a distant cousin, sound-wise. All of the first wave bands that got saddled with the “shoegaze” tag loved MBV’s Isn’t Anything, but none of them actually succeeded in cloning that sound (thankfully).

TLDL: if people are using these pedals as a starting point to create something new, that’s awesome, but there are definitely bands out there that are happy to play the same old shit, as close as possible to their influences, and that’s a total bore.

I’ll leave you with this stellar example of a band who got it really, really right by getting it wrong (effects-wise)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o51PHVH7kQw

[jorri]

(To imitate pioneering musicians by being retrospective...they'd use something more pioneering today!)

I think about this all the time. Like how they showed Beethoven in Bill And Ted's Excellent Adventure using modern synthesizers. It makes me laugh that famous musician's famous sounds from the past, as those guys would definitely be using new stuff or obscure stuff in weird ways, were they still alive. I love the idea of seeing what dead artists would do with today's technology and gear.

Quintessential cases in point - even though I'm sure they use some old gear at time - Slowdive and even MBV. They use new options now, live and on record, even though their SPX and FX500 sounds are still the ones people are chasing.

well, yeh Slowdive stopped using racks and moved to Eventides and Neunabers themselves to recreate those sounds which is just the irony of it (if not inherently an actual problem, its just ironic)- that they moved from one flawed necessity into having many options to make these sounds thus picked something else. Don't know if MBV still use a rack but they use other things too. Of course, you can use pedals for other things, but I haven't heard a lot of modern shoegaze that was innovative, and when something is, the shoegazer diehards go " ThAtS nOt AcTuAlLy ShOeGaZe " and start a monologue about the history of a Ride album on some kind of loop.

[Larry Mal]

Well, I bought one.

I'm not a big fan of shoegaze and I'm in no sense steeped in these sounds, don't really know the music all that well, and have spent zero time caring about what equipment was used on music I haven't heard. To me, this is just a pedal I read about and liked the sound of.

So, thanks!

[del]

I don't think it's stupid, just a modern development in pedal design.

Gaze-y/drone-y music is on a real upswing and folks are listening to it, sometimes for the first time. And when trying to replicate those sounds they turn to these new "shoegaze" pedals, which fit current trends-and-tastes in pedal design. And lots of them are quite cleaver and creative little boxes of wires and electro-bits that easily make specific sorts of cool sounds.

Alas, these young kids will never understand the trials and tribulations of ordering and reordering a dozen dirt and modulation pedals in an attempt to sound like an MBV record.

The kids are alright, I think.

[timiscott]

Well... I'm enough of an antique to have supported Ride (for a local gig) on their first tour in the UK. Shoegaze went from them and MBV wanting to be Sonic Youth to me (a Londoner) walking into Sam Ash in 2017 to be served by a kid in a Ride t-shirt and then sitting in a Manhattan bar drinking 'Shoegaze' pale ale. It was pretty weird. I'm guessing it's to do with the twenty year (generational?) cycle of pop culture. What I'm dreading is the Britpop revival that seems inevitable. Can you imagine how bad a Xeroxed Blur or Suede might be? Might bring Wire back though...

[cestlamort]

What I'm dreading is the Britpop revival that seems inevitable. Can you imagine how bad a Xeroxed Blur or Suede might be?

It’s already begun…
Epiphone Unveils Noel Gallagher model

[jorri]

Might bring Wire back though...

Took me a while to get this but i finally realised the connection...