Devin Townsend

Canadian guitarist and producer whose signature is density -- a wall of layered, heavily processed guitar that behaves more like a synth pad than a rhythm track. Through the Strapping Young Lad and Ocean Machine years he worked almost entirely from Peavey 5150s with EMG-loaded ESPs, and he has been unusually candid about the limitation that shaped the sound: at that point he had no clean tone at all, only a noisy wet crunch, so the ambience had to come from a rack unit rather than from backing off the gain.