06 MAP OF THE PROBLEMATIQUE BLACK HOLES AND REVELATIONS(2006)

It’s no secret that Muse have been responsible for some of the most dazzling tones over the last two decades – and this 2006 track could be the pick of the bunch. If its opening guitars sound more like a distorted synthesizer, that’s because it was originally written and demoed on keyboards. “I really wanted to hear it on guitar, but there was no way to play the keyboard part on the guitar,” recalled Black Holes producer Rich Costey in 2007.

The band spent the next two days reverse-engineering the idea, using a range of equipment to make Bellamy’s guitar react like an arpeggiator. “It’s a guitar going through three different modular synths that are opening up at different times,” explained Costey. “Two of the synths are routed into different pitch shifters – one is an octave up, the other is an octave down. The guitar was split into three the ARP 2600, a Korg MS-20 and an EMS Synthi