For the love of Godspeed

So you want to start sounding like Godspeed You! Black Emperor on Guitar but don’t know where to start? This is your simple guide to doing so easily and on a budget. If you loved their albums such as Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas to Heaven along with the other albums they made (and still are making), you will find the guide useful for sounding like them too. Just read on to find out how you do that.

Guitars

Godspeed makes the slow and very very long songs so you need the right instrument to achieve that. Efrim Menuck is the leader of the Godspeed band and he plays guitar, so to start sounding like them you should first get a guitar. The problem is guitars are very expensive and not very affordable, so that is a major roadblock to your journey to sound like Godspeed and Efrim. Luckily Amazon offers this very nice ADM Full Size Electric Acoustic which is a great tool to start souning like Godspeed. Pick up this guitar, plug it in and start strumming the guitar to achieve sounds similar to Godspeed and Silver Mt. Zion. For under $100 it would be hard to resist.

Amps

Godspeed’s albums are quiet in parts, but then get very intense and loud. You will need two amps to achieve the proper Godspeed sounds, one quiet one (that is small) and one very loud, big one.

For a small amp, we reccomend the Roland Cube, a very reliable, sturdy and great sounding battery operated amp. It doesn’t get very loud and it is a little small one, so it’s perfect for doing the quiet parts of Godspeed songs.

For a loud Amp, we reccomend the clasci Marshal JCM 800. A big, loud great amp that has been used by rock legends such as Led Zeppelin, ACDC and J. Mascis of Dinosaur Jr. (featuring j. mascis). You will use this big beast of a amp to play the loud intense parts of all those Godspeed songs and sound like them that way. This one costs about $2600 and is just the head not the cabinet so you need to buy that too.

 

Pedals

A big way to start sounding like Godspeed is to use pedals, which they use many of to achieve their sound. Also remember that there are other weird instruments in the group such as violins and other ones. So instead of finding a violin player, why don’t you get a pedal that makes you sound like a violin such as this Electro-Harmonix Mel-9. It mimicks the sounds of Mellotron, which was a machine that sounded like a violin and other sounds. But now you can plug right into that one and sound just like a violin along with many other very good sounds in the box.

 

Another thing you need to sound like Godspeed, pedal wise, is a tuner pedal. Because the songs are so long, your guitar will go out of tune over the course of the amount of time the song is. So you need to get the tuner to make sure the guitar is in tune for the next song.

In conclusion

If you get these pieces of gear you will sound just like Godspeed in no time! Sounding like Godspeed is not easy, but it just got alot easier with this guide.