So, last night I saw the smashing pumpkins play in the progress energy center in raleigh. Review to come, great show (no pics unfortunately, except of a filling venue).

Now, I'm not sure if they actually did this in their show, or if its an idea that came to me watching them. The final song of the show, before the encore, was a 30 minute or so psychedelic freakout thing, but I swear they were tuning their guitars in the middle of it. So the idea is (they didn't do this specifically, as after the encore were two singalong kind of songs, one being "we only come out at night", the other I'll leave as a surprise for the review ), during the middle of a song you have a rather short, at least compared to a thirty minute experiment, part where you mess with all of your effects, have fun, a good time to mess with your delay's feedback or delay time knobs, and your favorite 'make-a-mess-out-of-your-tone' effects, but all the while detuning your guitar.

At first you can incorporate it into the song, say rhythmically just detune all of your strings (much like paul gilbert does at the end of this song), doesn't have to be a specific amount, just drop them a few tones, mess with some effects, maybe solo a little bit. Have some heavy delay feedback or something similar to give the audience some noise while you then tune your strings up, but to a dropped (or open or whatever really, just a different tuning in the same song) tuning for say, some really heavy riffing to end the song. Or you could do it again to go back to the normal tuning again after a while.

Just an idea I had at the show last night. What do you think?

I have never really been a big fan of the pumpkins or such noise attacks, but it sounds intersting for sure.

Well, I guess it is OK to do this if the audience and the band feels it's cool. I would never do a noise thing on stage, maybe some similar (melodic) stuff with lots of effects between the songs can be cool to cover up the silence at some point, but other than that I'm not too much of a fan with noise making. Maybe if I had more processing power on stage I could do interesting stuff, but the audience IMO wouldn't find too cool to watch the guitar player stomping on effects and playing detuned guitar I guess

To be honest, I'm not a big fan of pointless noisemaking myself. I like to utilize and make something of my effects, rather than just hit a note and go "ooooh", I fully realize audiences find that stuff boring most of the time The point here is to enable you to change tunings mid way through a song, you could probably do it pretty quickly if you wanted.

Paul's idea was really cool
tho it doesn't work for locking systems

If you were to incorporate it into a song, maybe you could have an extra guitar with you without a floyd, and just use that guitar on the one song. It would work fine with locking tuners as long as there's no floyd on the guitar, you could just loosen the locks on the tuners before you played the song and when you tuned back up you could tighten them again

Now I've seen more than couple of times John Frusciante doing wild noise making, but then again he has the gear to back things up. I must admit I didn't like these performances too much really.