Soundgarden

Soundgarden formed in Seattle in 1984, with guitarist Kim Thayil developing one of the heaviest guitar tones in alternative rock through an unwavering commitment to a single instrument. Thayil's Guild S-100 served as his primary guitar for the band's entire career — 'I've pretty much been using that for seventeen years,' he stated. The Guild's dual humbuckers fed into a Mesa/Boogie Trem-O-Verb combo as his main amplifier, complemented by a Mesa/Boogie Electradyne head for a broader stereo stage sound. His pedalboard centered on an Electro-Harmonix Big Muff Pi for sludgy fuzz textures and a ProCo RAT for tighter distortion, with a Dunlop Cry Baby Wah adding vocal sweep to lead work on tracks like Fourth of July and an MXR Phase 90 for psychedelic modulation. Early Soundgarden recordings employed Sunn Model T amplifiers, whose massive low-end response gave the band's debut-era material an almost doom-metal weight. Thayil's unconventional approach to tunings and time signatures, filtered through this relatively fixed gear setup, produced some of the most inventive heavy guitar music of the 1990s across Badmotorfinger and Superunknown.