“Even if no-one’s applauding, this is still going”: Mark Speer was so afraid the audience wouldn’t applaud at early Khruangbin shows, he figured out how to do it on guitar

Genre-blenders Khruangbin had a stratospheric rise from cover band to festival headliners. Way before their Grammy nominee days, guitarist Mark Speer found a guitar “trick” that would encourage even the most hesitant audiences to clap – with a little help from his Boss DS-1 Distortion and his then go-to delay, the Strymon El Capistan.

“When we first started playing, I didn't really know how audiences were going to react to what we were doing,” Speer tells Premier Guitar. “And I was trying toapproximate the sound of applause. Because when people hear applause, they'll tend to clap along.

“If you guys have ever played Mike Tyson's Punch Out [the legendary 1987 boxing video game], there's a sound that happens when the audience is being an audience. Like, this sort of white noise.

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He continues, “With the delay, I'd be like [strums] and then eventually it just becomes noise. I know it doesn't sound like applause, but it fills up that same sort of sonic space, and so even if no one's applauding, this is still going. [It is] just this dumb trick that I was doing, and I still do it, and it's all due to Mike Tyson's Punch Out.”

Elsewhere in the interview, Speer looks back at the band's start as an unconventional cover band.

“We played cover songs. But the cover songs we played were usually really esoteric Thai songs or Indian songs or Ethiopian songs,” he explains.

His philosophy at the time? “Well, people are covering songs – might as well just cover the songs we like,” he says matter-of-factly.

“You gotta understand that I was already in my 30s when we started this thing. It's like, 'Well, I'm not gonna make it. Let's just start a band, and just play whatever the hell we want.' So if people don't like our covers, then fine, it doesn't matter. Let's name our band something that no one can pronounce. Let's just play all instrumental music. Let's do everything wrong.”

It seems like sticking to their guns worked out for the best. Speer, alongside his bandmate, bassist Laura Lee Ochoa, made history as the first members of a band to have a signature guitar and bass come out at the same time in Fender history.