How to sound like Sunn O)))
Tune way down, play almost nothing, and let two or three chords ring forever through a wall of heavy fuzz. In the box, that fuzz is Drown: Murk up for the drowning distortion, Depth to keep the sub solid.
I want to be honest up front. I have never stood in front of a Sunn O))) amp wall, and I would not tell you I have. What I know is what is documented in interviews and what my ears tell me when I listen. But I have spent a lot of time chasing heavy, slow, physical sounds for placements and for my own records, and the Sunn O))) approach is one of the most useful things a producer can steal from, even if you never make a single drone track. So let me walk through how the sound is built and how I get close to it without a truck full of cabinets.
A short history of the Sunn O))) sound
Sunn O))) is Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson. The band is named after Sunn amplifiers, the old brand, and the three arcs in the logo come from that logo. What they make is usually called drone metal or drone doom. There are almost no drums on most of it. Instead you get massive, sustained, down-tuned chords that do not really function as riffs so much as pure texture and physical low-frequency pressure. You feel it in your chest before you parse it as music.
Live, they are known for the robes and the fog, playing at volumes that are more felt than heard. The lineage they point back to is Earth, the Dylan Carlson project that more or less wrote the book on slow, heavy drone, and the Melvins, who taught a whole generation that slow and loud is its own kind of aggression. If you have never gone down this road, those two names are the map.
The players and their gear
I am going to hedge here because the exact rigs shift over the years and I do not want to invent specifics. What is well documented is the shape of it: enormous walls of amplifiers, thick fuzz and overdrive stacked up, extreme down-tuning, and very few notes held for a very long time. Feedback and sustain are treated as the instrument. A single chord can be the whole idea for a minute or more, changing only in how the overtones bloom and decay as it hangs there.
The takeaway is not the brand names on the cabinets. It is the philosophy. Fewer notes than you think you need. More sustain than feels comfortable. Distortion that is less about grit on top and more about a whole wall of sound that never lets up. If you want related listening to understand the space, Earth is the slow root of it and Boris, especially their heavier, drone-leaning records, is a good companion. Between those two you get the range from meditative to crushing.
How to get it: the Siesta plugin chain
The drone chain, in the box
- Tune way down and play almost nothing. Drop to drop C, drop B, or lower. Pick two or three notes, ideally a low root and a fifth, and let them ring. Do not move. The restraint is the sound.
- Push it through Drown. Turn Murk high for the full drowning fuzz, then set Depth so the low end stays as one solid mass instead of turning to mush. This is where the wall comes from.
- Add feedback and sustain, keep it slow. Ride the sustain with volume swells or a held note into feedback, let each chord decay all the way out before the next one, and resist every urge to fill the space.
The core move is that middle step. A lot of people try to get this sound by piling on gain until everything fizzes, and what they end up with is thin and buzzy with no floor under it. That is the opposite of what you want. The Sunn O))) feeling is heavy at the bottom. You need distortion that stays fat and controlled when it is drowning in itself, and you need the sub to hold together so the chord reads as one giant thing.
Drown keeps the floor under your heaviest riff
Murk pushes it from a Big-Muff snarl toward a full drowning fuzz, and Depth holds the low end together so the bottom never turns to mud. Drop it on a downtuned guitar or a bass and it stays crushing at volume. Mac, Windows and Linux, offline license.
Get Drown · $39 →Dialing it in
Once the chain is set, most of the work is taste and patience. A few things I keep coming back to:
- Play fewer notes than feels right. If you are doubting whether to add a note, do not. Space is the instrument here as much as the fuzz is.
- Chase sustain, not speed. Let a chord bloom and decay all the way out. The overtones shifting over time are the melody.
- Mind the sub on real speakers. Headphones and small monitors will lie to you about the low end. Check the mix on something with real bottom, or at least a decent sub, so you know the floor is actually there and not just felt as pressure in your skull.
- Layer a guitar and a bass through the same fuzz. Two sources drowning together, tuned an octave apart, is a fast way to that wall-of-amps width without a wall of amps.
If you like this territory and want to hear how the same ideas play out with a bit more groove and swing to them, I wrote up the Electric Wizard guide too. Same family of heavy, different corner of the room. Between drone doom and that stoner-doom sway you get most of what a downtuned guitar can do at the low, slow end.
The last thing I will say is that you do not have to make forty minute drone pieces to use any of this. The trick of tuning down, playing next to nothing, and letting a fat controlled fuzz hold the whole bottom of the mix is useful anywhere you want weight. I have leaned on it for scoring cues that needed dread without a single obvious "metal" signal in them. Get the floor right first, then decide how much you want to play on top of it. Usually the answer is less.