I was at the Skepticism, Thou Shell of Death and Forgotten Sunrise gig in the ruins of Padise Monastery in Estonia yesterday (28.09.2013) . Considering that Skepticism seems to perform live only once every couple of years or so it was extremely surprising to see them perform so close to me.

Anyway the atmosphere of the monastery ruins is an extremely suitable place for listening to a good funeral metal band and at almost 2 hours the Skepticisms gig was longer than the previous ones I have been to. Aside from a couple of people constantly chatting, yelling and whistling in the front row there was nothing to complain about. The sound and the performance by Skepticism were just perfect.

The best that I could capture with my N900 is this:

You can probably find much better pictures of the event from its Facebook page.

As a (lousy) guitarist I was very interested in how exactly does Skepticism achieve such a nice thick sound that sometimes sounds like they have 2 guitars playing so I took a picture of the guitarist’s rig:

The bottom row of pedals from left to right is:

• Boss FV-50 volume pedal
• Electro Harmonix Metal Muff (distortion)
• Morley George Lynch Tripler Pedal (3 way output splitter)
• Boss Metal Zone (distortion)
• Boss Metal Core (distortion)

The single smaller pedal in the center seems to be some kind of Korg tuner since there’s nothing coming out of it. Can’t find an exact match though.

The first and the third channel of the Tripler splitter are active. Metal Muff is connected to the first channel and the two Boss distortions are connected to the third channel in series (probably not used at the same time). The second channel of the splitter is inactive and connected to the Korg tuner.

So to make the long story short the thick guitar sound seems to be achieved by using two different distortions on different amp channels in parallel.