Way before genre-defiers Khruangbin were nominated for a Grammy Award, the trio started as a cover band, learning where they wanted to take their sound. They eventually earned a meteoric rise, headlining festivals and getting the aforementioned Grammy nomination in 2025. But the early days around their start in 2010 were still full of unknowns.
Speaking with Premier Guitar in February 2026, guitarist Mark Speer recalled the trick he learned to help out apprehensive audiences. Essentially, when Khruangbin was starting out playing live shows, they weren’t sure what their audiences would think. There’s nothing worse than playing a set and having no one clap.
“When we first started playing, I didn’t really know how audiences were going to react to what we were doing,” said Speer. “And I was trying to approximate the sound of applause. Because when people hear applause, they’ll tend to clap along.”
Speer used his guitar to create an applause-like sound to kickstart any unsure audiences, just in case. He used a BOSS DS-1 distortion pedal and a Strymon El Capistan delay pedal to create a sort of white noise, he told the outlet.
Khruangbin Guitarist Mark Speer on the Audience Trick He Learned From a Video Game
“If you guys have ever played Mike Tyson’s Punch Out [the 1987 boxing video game], there’s a sound that happens when the audience is being an audience. Like, this sort of white noise,” Mark Speer continued, talking with John Bohlinger in the interview.
Speer demonstrated how he would make the sound, which began with a simple strum on his guitar. “And then eventually it just becomes noise,” he said. “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.”
Even though Khruangbin audiences nowadays probably don’t need help applauding, it’s interesting to hear that Mark Speer still does this white-noise trick. When Khruangbin started as a cover band, he said, they played “really esoteric Thai songs or Indian songs or Ethiopian songs.”
Speer added that the band’s mindset at the time was, “Well, people are covering songs—might as well just cover the songs we like.”
That free-wheeling early approach paid off when they started composing their own songs and releasing albums. Without a doubt, Khruangbin’s music clearly shows their influences, but their projects often defy easy categorization.
Photo by Telmo Pinto/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
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