Garbage

Garbage formed in Madison, Wisconsin in 1994 when producer Butch Vig — fresh from producing Nirvana's Nevermind — recruited guitarist Duke Erikson, guitarist Steve Marker, and vocalist Shirley Manson. Their self-titled debut (1995) was built in Vig's Smart Studios using an approach that treated the recording console itself as an instrument: guitar parts were recorded, sampled, processed through effects chains, re-amped, and layered into dense walls of noise that owed as much to industrial music as to alternative rock. Marker played a Fender Jaguar through a Marshall JCM900, but much of what appeared on the album was his guitar signal processed through Vig's rack of effects — distortion, ring modulators, and granular delay units — then bounced back through amplifiers and re-recorded. Erikson's Gibson Les Paul Standard provided warmer, thicker tones that sat beneath the more aggressive processed textures. The band's approach to production was unique in 1990s rock: they recorded to two-inch tape, transferred to Pro Tools for editing and manipulation, then printed the results back to tape. Version 2.0 (1998) pushed the electronic processing further, with Manson's vocals run through Eventide Harmonizers and Vig's collection of vintage compressors. The bass parts — often synthesized rather than played — sat on a bed of 808-influenced drum programming layered with live kit recordings. Beautiful Garbage (2001) added more pop structure but maintained the band's signature technique of building walls of processed guitar noise beneath Manson's vocals. Live, the band translated the studio complexity with a surprisingly conventional setup — Jaguar and Les Paul through Marshall amps — relying on floor pedals to approximate the studio's processed textures.