Creep

The dynamic shift from clean verse to crunchy chorus is everything in this song. Johnny Greenwood scrapes his pick to create that ugly pre-chorus scratch.

Jonny Greenwood’s explosive pre-chorus stabs are strongly associated with a Marshall ShredMaster driving the clean channel of a Fender Eighty-Five, while the verses rely on a much cleaner, wider guitar texture. The exact clean-layer guitar and control positions were not published, so those settings are approximated from the band’s early-1990s rigs. Source: Kuassa’s “Creep Guitar Tone Breakdown,” Mixdown’s Jonny Greenwood gear rundown, and The King of Gear.

The verse combines a subdued, tremolo-treated clean guitar with Jonny Greenwood's much harsher Telecaster Plus, Marshall ShredMaster and Fender Eighty-Five chorus sound. Greenwood creates the famous pre-chorus impacts by violently striking muted strings rather than playing defined chords. The clean-chain settings are reconstructed from Ed O'Brien's early effects rig, while the distortion architecture is documented. Source: The King of Gear and Kuassa's Creep tone breakdown.