How to sound like Deftones
Deftones is two worlds at once: crushing downtuned riffs and dreamy, reverb-soaked atmosphere. Get the dream side with Adrift and the heavy side with Drown.
I have chased the Deftones sound for years, and the thing that took me the longest to accept is that it is not one tone. It is two tones sitting on top of each other, and the magic is in the seam where they meet. If you only build the heavy part you get a metal band. If you only build the pretty part you get a shoegaze band. Deftones is both playing at the same time, and this is how I go about it in the box.
A short history of the Deftones sound
Deftones came out of Sacramento in the early nineties, built around Chino Moreno on vocals and Stephen Carpenter on guitar. On paper they got lumped in with the heavy bands of that era, but pretty quickly you could hear they were reaching for something else. By the time of Around the Fur in 1997 and then White Pony in 2000, the band had figured out a fusion that nobody else was really doing: the weight and downtuned attack of metal welded to the blurred, reverb-heavy atmosphere of shoegaze and dream-pop.
That contrast is the whole identity. A riff that sounds like it could cave in a room, and then a section that floats like a My Bloody Valentine record. Loud into soft, heavy into ethereal, often within the same song and sometimes within the same bar. Carpenter brings the low-end violence and Moreno brings the dreaminess, both in his singing and in the second-guitar textures he plays. When people say a band sounds "like Deftones," what they usually mean is that seam, the way the beautiful part and the brutal part refuse to cancel each other out.
The players and their gear
I want to be careful here because I have not stood in the room with their rigs, so I am going off what has been documented publicly over the years and what my own ears tell me. Treat the specifics as directional, not gospel.
Carpenter is closely associated with extended-range guitars, seven-string and later eight-string instruments, tuned very low. That extra low string is a big part of why the riffs feel like they are dragging the floor with them. Into a big high-gain amp, that low tuning gives you the crush without turning into pure mud, at least when it is dialed in right. On the heavy side you are hearing tight, saturated, downtuned guitar with a lot of low-mid weight.
The other half is the atmosphere. Clean or lightly driven guitars drenched in lush reverb, chorus and delay, often layered so you cannot pick out a single line. There are ambient synth and texture layers underneath a lot of the songs, filling the space between the riffs so the quiet parts never feel empty. And then the vocal, which swings from a whisper to a scream and back, sometimes doubled and washed in reverb so it sits in the same cloud as the guitars. I would not swear to any exact pedal or amp model, and honestly the specific boxes matter less than the roles: one guitar built to hit hard, one guitar built to dissolve.
How to get it: the Siesta plugin chain
The Deftones chain, in the box
- Downtune first. Get your guitar into a low tuning before you touch a plugin. Drop the whole thing down, or use a seven or eight string if you have one, so the riff already has weight coming in. No amount of processing fakes a real low string.
- Heavy riffs through Drown. Run the downtuned rhythm guitar into Drown for the crush. Turn up Murk for the saturated, downtuned grind and use Depth to push how much low-end doom sits under the note. This is your Carpenter side, the part that caves the room in.
- Clean atmosphere guitars through Adrift. Take a separate clean or lightly driven part and send it into Adrift for the dreamy reverb wall. This is the floating, shoegaze half, the part that makes it Deftones and not just a heavy band.
- Blend the two worlds and mind the low end. Balance the heavy track against the atmosphere track so neither one wins, then carve so they are not both fighting for the same low frequencies. The seam between them is the sound.
Adrift builds the wall in one plugin
It puts the reverb before the fuzz for you, so the wash blooms instead of sitting behind the note, and it drowns the pick attack automatically. Heat sets how hard the reverb feeds the saturation, Melt sets how far the whole thing dissolves. Load it on a clean guitar, roll them up, and you are inside the wall in about ten seconds. Mac, Windows and Linux, offline license.
Get Adrift · $39 →Dialing it in
A few things I keep coming back to when I am trying to land in this territory:
- Keep the heavy guitar tight. Downtuned and saturated is good, but if the riff turns to mush you lose the contrast that makes the pretty part hit. Roll off some low mud on the rhythm bus if it starts to blur.
- Let the atmosphere breathe in the quiet sections. Where the riff drops out, push Melt on Adrift higher so the clean part fully dissolves into wash. That swing between focused and dissolved is the emotional trick.
- Do not stack the low end. The downtuned riff and any synth pads will both want the bottom, so pick one to own the sub and high-pass the other so they stop wrestling.
- Wash the vocal too. A little reverb and delay on the voice, sitting in the same space as the guitars, ties the two worlds together instead of leaving the singer stranded on top.
If you want to go deeper on the dream side of all this, the same reverb-before-distortion idea is the whole story behind the My Bloody Valentine guide, and Deftones borrowed plenty from that well. Build the wall there, bring the crush from Drown, and let them meet in the middle. That meeting point is the sound.