That Wall of Sound

I was listening today to a bunch of old albums (specifically stuff released in the late 80's early 90's) today and I was curious as to how you would approach creating that sort of shoegazery wall of sound style that was prominent in so many productions back in the day. Of course, the majority of what I listened to is very reverb/delay drenched guitars... I only play bass but I can run my source through some amp sim's and probably fake some simple riffs. Here are a few examples of what im talking about:

The Sugarcubes - Traitor

Kitchens of Distinction - Railwayed

Cocteau Twins - Heaven or Las Vegas

Heres an early attempt I made which ended up sounding more like a Pixies song than what Im shooting for but I think manipulating the reverb more and sitting the drums further back in the mix will get me closer to what Im trying to acheive:

http://www.aymat.org/temp/audio/poop.mp3

How would you approach it?

Imo there's your answer right there.... get hold of some cheap effect units of the era like SPX-90s , SRVs/SDEs or MidiVerb IIs and crank up the reverb/delay time heavily ..

and also repeat the same guitar / bass line on more than one track (or copy/paste in your DAW) and change them slightly...

Reverb units with a huge amount of delay time ("cathedral" type 'verbs) and a balance in the dry / wet heavily favoring the wet more than normal. Combining with a delay or a chorus is also an option.

Shoegaze and other "dreamy" productions need you to be open minded and experimental with effects. Like ambient, your reverb is going to be key to your sound.

Vocals in the background -- they should blend in with the production.

Mid-hump EQ -- do not overcompress the sound like a modern production; de-emphasize the bass; for many of the instruments (the dreamy reverb-trail stuff), cut the top end shimmer some, too, if needed.

Something like that.

Robin Guthrie(Cocteau Twins) gives great info on his set up and effects via this link...

http://www.cocteautwins.org/~robin/equipment.html

Here's Alan Parsons' tribute to the Phil Spector sound:

[YOUTUBE]ALC7kt6iUHY[/YOUTUBE]

it does kind of sound like a pixies cover, needs more frank black though.

my technique resides a lot more in EQ and using at most 2 types of reverb, you can listen to some of my noises and see if you agree with it... in my mind, the human ear is easily fooled by high-mid clutter, and you can use that to your advantage.

Thanks for the suggestions fellas...

Did a little search and found this stompbox:

Sounds like it can get pretty close to what Im looking for. Not sure if I'll bite and buy one just yet... I'd like to see what I can do with software fx first.