Sleep tone.

[Tukaar]

I've been toying around with various distortion pedals and amplifiers for around to years now trying to find just one thing: How can I achieve Sleep's Holy Mountain tone on an extremely limited budget. (Namely in the song "The Druid")

I've played around with the Boss OD-20, two different Big Muffs, my MP-1 preamp, various Behringer pedals, MXR Distortion +, MXR Blue Box (with C11 mod), MXR Wylde Overdrive, the list goes on.

Is there a specific pedal I could buy or any combo of the shit that I own that may yield some satisfactory results?

 

[Meldville]

Tubescreamer or Rat (maybe Big Muff) into a vintage head + cab (maybe a Bassman, Sovtek, or something else relatively easy/cheap to come by). It goes beyond just the pedal. Also depends on what kind of guitar you are playing.

If you're wondering what he used - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Pike

Pike has hardly changed his guitar set up since his time in Sleep. He plays two or three Gibson Les Pauls in High On Fire, including the cherry-sunburst standard he used in his previous band. During the early years of Sleep, Pike used Laney and Orange Amps but Pike and Al Cisneros discovered the Matamp “Green” while on tour in England, which became their preferred amplifier. In the recent string of Northwest shows he has been seen using a First Act nine-string guitar. The bottom three strings (E, A, and D) are regular guitar strings, while the top three (G, B, and high E) are from a twelve-string making the total number of strings nine. Apparently, First Act constructed the guitar just for Matt.

A few photos online have shown him using his Laney amps and some Marshall amps as well. In the Sleep "Dragonaut" video, he was shown using a Hiwatt amplifier. Initially, the only other addition he made to his set up after Sleep was adding a Soldano X-77 Preamp (to add more gain) to the Green head. Pike would feed the Matamp and Soldano signal into a Solid State Power Amp to power his Green Cabinets. He eventually switched to a beefy Soldano SLO-100 Head during the Blessed Black Wings era.

 

[Carrion]

Pike plays Soldano a lot more than Green nowadays.

 

[Tukaar]

I've heard good things about the RAT pedals, and I've actually been thinking about getting a Soldano SP-77 Preamp like Pike used on High on Fire's "Art of Self Defense" album.

 

[Natron808]

It's going to be rough finding the later Sleep sound on a budget. Early stuff was a lot of Laney AOR. Later stuff was indeed centered around Matamps which are quite costly in the states. People often quote that they used Matamp "Green" amps but I don't think many know that Matamp stamped the "Green" logo on the front of a bunch of models during that time. "Green" Matamps can be a GT120, GTL, GTO, Roadster or possibly a couple other models, all of which sound different and have different features. The GT120 is what Sleep used and it is very close to the old early 70s Orange OR120 (because the Oranges were designed and built by Matamp FOR Orange who later split from Matamp as their own company and took the amp design with them... the thieves!). In fact, on stage during the Sleep reunion shows a couple of weeks ago, you can see Matt Pike playing through a couple of old Oranges... and it sounds exactly like their Jerusalem/Dopesmoker album recorded with Matamp GT120s.

Outside of the pointless history lesson, their sound revolved around vintage gear. Early stuff being Laney AORs, you can get their with the right EQing and overdrive pedal. Later stuff being Matamps, it was much looser and fuzzier sounding and some of the darker fuzz pedals out there can get you kind of close.