How to sound like DIIV
Write two clean, interlocking guitar lines with a lot of delay, then run them through Adrift so the reverb feeds the fuzz and the whole thing blooms into a wall.
People ask me how to get that DIIV sound. The bright, gliding, slightly sad guitar thing where two parts weave around each other and the whole track feels like it is underwater but still moving fast. I have chased it plenty in my own sessions, so here is how I think about it and how I get close without a pedalboard the size of a coffee table.
A short history of the DIIV sound
DIIV started as the project of Zachary Cole Smith, out of Brooklyn, and the band grew from there. If you go back to the first record, "Oshin" from 2012, you hear the blueprint pretty clearly. It is a modern take on shoegaze and dream pop, but it is not just a wash of noise. It is built on bright, interlocking guitar lines that keep repeating and shifting, more like little motifs than riffs. The songs move. There is a lot of forward motion in the rhythm even when the guitars are hazy.
The later records fill that picture in. "Is the Is Are" from 2016 is bigger and more layered, and "Deceiver" from 2019 gets noticeably heavier and darker, with more weight in the low end and more fuzz on the guitars. So the DIIV sound is not one static thing. It is a bright, jangly dream-pop core that, over time, picked up more grit and heft. When you are trying to cop it, decide which era you are aiming at first, because the early stuff is cleaner and chimier and the newer stuff leans on distortion.
The players and their gear
I want to be careful here, because I have not stood in a room with their rigs, and gear talk online turns into folklore fast. So take specific model names as rumor and the general approach as the useful part. What is clear from listening and from what the band has said publicly over the years is the method more than any one box.
The core is bright, clean guitars run through some combination of chorus, delay and reverb. The delay is doing a lot of the work. It smears the notes so a simple line sounds like it is echoing off into space. On top of that you have the arrangement trick that really defines the band: two guitars playing interlocking melodic lines rather than power chords. One part will play a repeating figure high up the neck, and the second part answers it or shadows it a step away, and the two together make a texture that is busier and prettier than either one alone. That is the thing to get right. It is a compositional move, not a pedal.
Over the top of that, the vocals sit low and hazy in the mix. They are part of the wash, not out front telling you exactly what to feel. And underneath it all there is a driving rhythm section, bass and drums that keep a steady, almost motorik push so the dreamy guitars have something urgent to float on. On the heavier records you hear more fuzz on the guitars, thicker and dirtier, but the interlocking-lines idea stays. If you have read the My Bloody Valentine guide or the Slowdive guide, you already know the shoegaze family tree. DIIV is a cousin who kept the melody bright and the tempo up.
How to get it: the Siesta plugin chain
The DIIV chain, in the box
- Write two interlocking clean guitar lines. Record a bright, clean part with a fair amount of delay, then track a second part that weaves around the first instead of doubling it. Keep them melodic and repeating, not chord-strummed.
- Run each through Adrift for the reverb-into-fuzz wash. Set Heat to feed the reverb into the saturation and Melt to decide how far the note dissolves. This is where the jangle turns into a wall.
- Layer and pan, keep the vocal low. Push the two guitars out to the sides so they read as a stereo texture, and mix the vocal down into the haze so it lives inside the wash instead of on top of it.
That is genuinely most of it. The magic is in the writing and the ordering. Delay on the way in, then reverb blooming into a little bit of fuzz, then two of those parts panned apart. If you do that and keep the drums steady, you are in the neighborhood.
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
- Delay first, then Adrift. Put your delay before the plugin so the reverb has echoes to bloom on. The order is the whole trick.
- Start with Heat, then reach for Melt. Bring Heat up until the reverb starts to overdrive and glow, and only then use Melt to push past pretty into a wall.
- Pan the two guitars wide. Hard left and hard right makes the interlocking lines read as one big stereo texture instead of a crowded center.
- Mix the vocal down. If you can make out every word easily, it is too loud for this style. Let it sink into the haze.