Make Shoegaze

Make shoegaze online with a personal producer who knows how to build a wall of sound. Free in your browser, Veena's CoProducer builds the layered fuzz guitars, the reverb, the steady live drums and the pad as real tracks you can edit, down to every guitar note and every effect setting.

Shoegaze is alternative rock where the guitars stop being a lead instrument and become weather. It grew out of the UK scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s; My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive and Ride are its best-known names. The name is a joke about musicians staring down at their effects pedals. Every decision below serves one idea: stack the guitars until they blur into a single glowing sound, then let the voice float inside it.

What is shoegaze?

Shoegaze is a style of alternative rock defined by layered, heavily processed guitars, washes of reverb and chorus, and soft vocals mixed low, so the voice reads as one more texture. The songs underneath are often simple: a few chords, a steady beat, a melody you can hum. The sound on top is what makes them shoegaze. Dream pop shares the haze but stays gentle; shoegaze adds fuzz and volume. If you want the quieter cousin, make indie music covers dream pop, and for the heavier family see make rock music.

Shoegaze in one table

The guitar wall: three tracks, one sound

The wall is not one big guitar. It is three parts that do three different jobs, then blend:

1. The bed. Long, held chords on Overdriven Guitar, the foundation.
2. The shimmer. Slow arpeggios on the same chords, which ring through the fuzz and add movement.
3. The top. A third guitar an octave higher, doubling the top notes of the chords, which adds air.

Give each guitar its own chain. Put the Distortion effect's Fuzz preset first, then Chorus on its Wide preset, then a Cathedral reverb with the Mix turned well up. Pan the three apart, one left, one right, one centre, and the stereo field fills. Because every clip carries its own effects, you can change one guitar's fuzz without touching the others. Ask CoProducer for "a fourth guitar, a high drone on the root" and it writes it.

Chords that suit the wall

Shoegaze favours chords that ring open and never fully resolve, so the wash has somewhere to hang.

Suspended and seventh chords work because the extra note rings through the fuzz without turning muddy. For more on building progressions, see the rock chord progressions page.

Drums and bass: steady under the storm

The drums are the one calm thing in the song. Choose the Live kit for a roomy sound, and write a plain backbeat: kick on 1 and 3, snare on 2 and 4, 8th-note hats. Put a Room reverb on the drum clip for space. Tom fills are for the end of a section, not every bar. The bass is just as plain: Electric Bass (pick) in straight 8ths on the roots, centred. A simple rhythm section gives the guitars room to blur without the song falling over.

A shoegaze arrangement

That is 128 bars, about four minutes at 118 BPM. The long instrumental is the point of the song: shoegaze lets the sound itself be the hook.

Make shoegaze with CoProducer

1. Open daw.veena.studio and sign in with Google. No download: the AI runs on Veena's servers.
2. Paste the prompt at the bottom of this page. It builds the full 128-bar arrangement above.
3. Audition the guitars. You get three takes of every new part, and parts that depend on others are written against the ones you chose.
4. Push it with plain words. Ctrl/Cmd+Z takes back any step:
   • "Add a fourth guitar, a high drone on the root note, in the last chorus."
   • "Make the verse guitars darker and the chorus guitars brighter."
   • "Swap the drums to a drum machine at the same tempo."
   • "Make the outro twice as long with the reverb Mix at the maximum."
5. Add your voice. Record the vocal from your microphone onto a new track, then record a second take for the chorus.
6. Export it. A 24-bit/48 kHz WAV, a 320 kbps MP3 or every track as stems, with no watermark and no limit on exports. The track is yours.

The shoegaze production chain

• Guitars: Fuzz, then Chorus, then a large reverb, in that order, on each clip.
• Cut the mud. On the 8-Band EQ, lower the low shelf under 150 Hz on every guitar so the bass keeps the bottom.
• Vocals low. A Plate or Cathedral reverb and a slap delay, with the fader set so the voice sits inside the guitars, not on top.
• Drums bright. Keep the snare and hats clear of the wash, with a little compression to hold the kit together.
• Pad as glue. A Warm Pad under the choruses fills the gaps between guitar notes.
• Loud master. Balance on the faders first, then ask CoProducer to master it loud and wide.

Mistakes that muddy the wall

1. One guitar doing everything. Three parts at three registers sounds huge; one part with more fuzz sounds muddy.
2. Every guitar panned centre. Spread them across the stereo field.
3. Low end on the guitars. Cut under 150 Hz so the bass and kick stay clear.
4. A vocal on top of the mix. Shoegaze vocals sit inside the sound.
5. Busy drums. A steady backbeat lets the guitars be the story.

Shoegaze terms

Wall of sound: many layered guitars blending into one texture. Fuzz: heavy, saturated guitar distortion. Chorus: an effect that doubles a sound with a slight detune. Reverb: the echo of a space; shoegaze uses a lot of it. Sus chord: a chord with the third replaced by the fourth or second, leaving it open. Dream pop: the softer, hazier cousin of shoegaze.

More styles live under make music by genre, and the lighter side of this sound is in make ambient music.