Hook me up with pedal-powered music. I'M NOT A COP.

[John]

Yo. I see all these ginormous pedal boards on ILF but then I listen to Earthless or something and it's like OD, wah wah, a fuzzz. I want to hear what people are doing with gigundo pedlage. I know these proze have massive collections (in other words, in b4 Nick Reinhart) but I'm not hearing all that gear in play (with the exception of Nick R). Hip a geezer to some shit where the pedals are really putting the work in. If it's a link to your own band, that's cool too.



P.S. if I was a cop I'd totally have to tell you

[PanicProne]

Interesting but really difficult topic to reply to. Mostly I think there's a lot of people doing some really nice sounds in "standard" 4/4 music. It's all about listening carefully. One example would be Bloc Party. I caught them live a few years ago. Though they are a bit weird at times, their music is still pretty straight forward but still has some mad pedal sounds going on here and there. Mars Volta and Bosnian Rainbows are maybe the next level. Music gets a bit quirkier and have a lots of pedal wank going on. Then there's the "Dillinger escape plan-thing" where it's not really sticking out in the mix, but there's alot of weird oscillations and soundscaping going on in the background of some tracks. And then there's bands like Dredg who don't always sound like they're working a lot of pedals, but have complex ways of achieving "simple" sounds.

All in all I think people tend to find one or two "cool sounds" and stick to those within their sound, rather than writing full songs on just stompbox wackyness, Tera Melos style. This is a lot due to the fact of how music "should sound", I think. A lot of people finds cool uses for pedals and effects but don't really make songs out of it just because it's "not how music is supposed to sound/be built".
Do people agree? Do you get where I'm going?

[Eivind August]

^ Indeed. I don't know of a lot of bands where various weird pedals are used for more than a couple of sounds here and there, or background noise. Bands like And so I watch you from afar and Battles have a lot of effects heavy passages, though.

[Achtane]

Melt-Banana

[kbit]

A Place To Bury Strangers has lots of different fuzz/delay/verb

Holy Fuck

King Buffalo

GY!BE

[lordgalvar]

Melt-Banana

Heck ya. Been wearing out that Lite Live album lately. Cell Scape is pure gold. I think this is a perfect example.

I don't know how big her pedal board actually is, but the guitar player from Rakta plays heavily effected. Mike Patton, but that is on vocals and sound effects. Dillenger Escape Plan actually have small pedal boards from what I remember(like a swollen pickle and a preamp). Nots maybe? Phantomsmasher/OLD...I've seen Plotkin run effects on a whole band and just do that. Gorgonized Dorks (though I wouldn't classify their pedal board as huge). GY!BE is a good suggestion. Radio head (the other guy not greenwood) live seem to rely more on pedals. Devo, heck, I'm stretching for answers. East/West Blast Test?

This is a tough one. I think at some level it is a level of security and collector show'n off. RCHP I never understood why they need large pedal boards for utterly bland music. That guy from Yeah Yeah Yeahs is ridiculous and I don't know how he even makes a guitar like sound after all that junk. I also know alot of these guys have redundancy on their boards so that they don't have to adjust and stuff. Like 6 ods or choruses all with slightly different settings for different songs but essentially the same sound.

[lordgalvar]

Going to add this...guys in YYYs and RHCP are running out 50+ pedals and Agata from Melt Banana is using like 15 max (from what I could tell when I saw them). The big thing is subjective I guess.

Just thought of Killing Joke.

[ThurberMingus]

Adebisi Shank doe. Bro has his Pitch Factor on like 99.9% of the time!

[John]

Adebisi Shank doe. Bro has his Pitch Factor on like 99.9% of the time!

Love that band.

[aen]

What? Pedals? Making music? What kind of insanity would that even be?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llQcjSrr4ZI[/youtube]

[John]

What manner of wizardry is this

[Big Mon]

Swervedriver

[PanicProne]

To clarify on my first post. Dillinger do really have small pedalboard, but studiowise they've used a lot in the past, I believe, although I might be wrong. Also, of course there are people making "pedalheavy" music too, but I think it's rare, or at least I haven't managed to get in on that scene myself yet..

[jrmy]

Well, since you said post stuff of our own bands, both my "regular" band http://monumenthief.bandcamp.com and my solo weirdness thing http://crotchthrottle.bandcamp.com involve oodles of pedals (many Crotchthrottle songs were written around specific pedals/combinations, though I never document that stuff properly, so I often don't remember the specific fx used).

Mars Volta?

Mylets

El Ten Eleven

My Bloody Valentine (I mean, at least live, as those Kevin Shields board pics bear out)

Mogwai

St. Vincent

Big Sir

Jean Baudin (aka ILF user elevenstrings)

http://nights.bandcamp.com/ - the band of an ILFer (Communarchy, maybe) - I think there were decent-sized boards involved, but maybe this is an example of one of those tricky bands...

[oscillofuzz]

The Mars Volta defintely made some pedal- and gear-heavy music, but their 2008 album The Bedlam in Goliath comes to mind as the one on which the guitar & bass used the most effects (and the vocals aren't exactly dry either).
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBkdv6FZLsE[/youtube]

Another gear-heavy band I really like is Jaga Jazzist, although they're not as pedal-based because they're not as guitar-based as TMV. Definitely worth checking out though.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgDd9luCWEM[/youtube]

Noise rock trio Staer also intensively use pedals to keep the noise going, although their boards weren't exactly huge (compared to MBV for example) when I saw them live.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFV1rxs4fDs[/youtube]

In something like death metal, I think Tribulation make tasteful use of effects on their 2013 album The Formulas of Death in an otherwise quite pedal-starved genre (usually it's just a HM-2 or something and not much else in death metal).
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFxhzKUI-Go[/youtube]

In black metal, Thaw has some unorthodox (for black metal standards) use of effects going on on their debut album.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPcMzb-T5w[/youtube]

And because you said you didn't mind people linking to their own bands, here's mine:

Both the guitarist and myself (bass-vi-ist) use quite a lot of effects. I should have a pic somewhere of the set-up I used during the recording of our debut album...

Ah, there it is