# Odd squeals, bends, sliding noises, and the techniques involved?



## kenken27 (Jun 24, 2013)

I'm a huge fan of guitarists like Joshua Travis, Layne Meylain, Daniel Bergström, and Wes Borland who have come up with some really disgusting sounding noises on the guitar. You can hear examples of these sounds in bands like The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza, Carbomb, Fronterier, When Knives Go Skyward, Vildhjarta, Gaza, etc.. Most of these sound like they come from pick scrapes, whammy bars, whammy pedals, odd harmonizing, and pre-bent harmonics, but I've never been able to find any clear videos of these guitarists playing live so I could decipher their tricks. This song has basically every single technique I'm talking about.

The Collapse - Frontierer - 2013 - YouTube

I've got a Floyd, a Digitech Whammy pedal, and plenty of gain. Does anybody know how to play any of these sounds?


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## Devyn Eclipse Nav (Jun 24, 2013)

Idk about some of the other stuff (but I can definitely hear whammy pedal use), but those scraps are done by sliding the side of the pick perpendicular to the strings, high to low. You can see it clearly done in Keith Merrow's 7 string Duncan comparison video with Wes Hauch.


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## that short guy (Jun 24, 2013)

kenken27 said:


> I'm a huge fan of guitarists like Joshua Travis, Layne Meylain, Daniel Bergström, and Wes Borland who have come up with some really disgusting sounding noises on the guitar. You can hear examples of these sounds in bands like The Tony Danza Tapdance Extravaganza, Carbomb, Fronterier, When Knives Go Skyward, Vildhjarta, Gaza, etc.. Most of these sound like they come from pick scrapes, whammy bars, whammy pedals, odd harmonizing, and pre-bent harmonics, but I've never been able to find any clear videos of these guitarists playing live so I could decipher their tricks. This song has basically every single technique I'm talking about.
> 
> The Collapse - Frontierer - 2013 - YouTube
> 
> I've got a Floyd, a Digitech Whammy pedal, and plenty of gain. Does anybody know how to play any of these sounds?



You said wes borland so here you go


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## kenken27 (Jun 24, 2013)

Thanks for the responses guys! I've seen the Wes Borland video before and after watching it again it's given me some ideas for the whammy bar stuff. I've known about the pick scrape technique too but never thought to trill pick it out and that seems to be one of the sounds Josh uses quite a bit. The hardest techniques for me right now are that weird steel guitar slide sounding bit in the Frontierer track and using the whammy pedal so perfectly. I think he's using multiple guitar tracks to do that though. Layne has lessons on BandHappy maybe ill try and schedule something with him!


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## xwmucradiox (Jun 25, 2013)

Most modern proggy deathcore stuff is extremely produced in the studio so getting those sounds in a live context can be really tough. The best way to approach getting those weird sounds is to play without playing. The pick scrapes across multiple strings are a good example. Try doing them with the strings muted or with a finger producing harmonics. You aren't really playing anything. You're just creating a noise and dropping it into normal playing. 

The prebent harmonics on low strings thing is relatively straightforward although it takes some practice to get consistent results. 

Listening to Daughters may also give you some ideas for new techniques that aren't natural results of playing traditional guitar riffs.


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## sear (Jun 29, 2013)

xwmucradiox said:


> Most modern proggy deathcore stuff is extremely produced in the studio so getting those sounds in a live context can be really tough. The best way to approach getting those weird sounds is to play without playing. The pick scrapes across multiple strings are a good example. Try doing them with the strings muted or with a finger producing harmonics. You aren't really playing anything. You're just creating a noise and dropping it into normal playing.
> 
> The prebent harmonics on low strings thing is relatively straightforward although it takes some practice to get consistent results.
> 
> Listening to Daughters may also give you some ideas for new techniques that aren't natural results of playing traditional guitar riffs.


This. Anything you do is not going to sound like the song at all because of the amount of layering, processing and effects on top of that stuff, plus the fact that it's all time-synced to perfection. It's almost a certainty that those songs are played literally bar-by-bar with tons of time-slicing, doing 20 takes and picking 1 out of them, etc. just to get things to sound perfect and clean.


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## erotophonophilia (Jun 29, 2013)

One of the techniques, is known as "pick raking." Here's a good example:
 
Gojira also use raking in Heaviest Matter of the Universe.
It's done by muting the strings with the left hand, and by picking the strings, using a sweeping picking motion, while simultaneously palm muting with the right hand.


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