Effects Explained: Overdrive

Adapted from the book Guitar Effects Pedals: The Practical Handbook (Backbeat Books)

Welcome to Part 1 of a new Gibson series that will dissect a different breed of effect each week, to tell you—the player—what each does, and how it does it. Effects pedals can be divided into a range of categories of types, but there are undeniably some gray areas between these, since different designs will achieve their sonic ends via different means. The distinctions get blurrier when we throw digital technology into the brew. An analog and a digital chorus, for example, are very different circuits, approached—from the design perspective—from very different standpoints, although the sonic results may sound roughly similar (in the good ones, though, the subtleties are usually quite distinctive).

For our purposes, I’ll break pedals down into four overarching categories: 1) Boost, Compression, Distortion, and Fuzz; 2) Modulation; 3) Echo and Delay; and 4) Filtering and EQ-Based effects, and this series will focus on individual types that come within each of those larger categories (for example, Modulation includes many quite different effects, such as chorus, vibrato, phasing, and so on). This is not to say that some manufacturers or other writers couldn’t categorize things differently, and certainly a few examples below could be safely lifted out of the heading I have stuck them in and accurately described by another category. It doesn’t matter all that much. These headings are mainly a means of breaking down the sonic results of the enormously varied range of pedals that exists out there, and taking a brief look at what makes them tick.

BOOST, DISTORTION & COMPRESSION

This is easily the most popular category of effect, and sonically is the natural first-step away from the thin sound of a straight, clean amplified guitar. If a player only owns one pedal, chances are it’s a distortion, fuzz, or booster box, and plenty of players have collections of several or even dozens of units from this genre, and use two or three at a time on their pedalboards for different colors and textures and levels of sonic sizzle. Yep, of the players who want to change their guitar’s pure sound in the first place, more probably want to filth it up than all of the other options combined.

Who created the first distorted electric guitar sound in history? I’ll tell you: the first adventurous player to plug a hollowbody guitar into a tube amplifier way back in the 1930s, that’s who. We might have forgotten his name, or maybe there was no one there to witness the event, but you can bet he lifted up that guitar, checked out his new amp, saw that the loudness control went to 10, and cranked it up to hear just what it could do.
Players and rock historians alike will talk endlessly about who either created or discovered or recorded the first distorted guitar tone. They argue, pontificate, debate, and even break it down into categories of type and of geographical location. “So, do we mean distortion, overdrive, or fuzz tone?” or “Do you distinguish between North American and European ‘firsts’?” Dave Davies of the Kinks is often credited with the first appearance of a heavily distorted electric guitar sound in the British charts for ‘You Really Got Me’ in August 1964.

“I was getting really bored with this guitar sound—or lack of an interesting sound,” Davies remembers. “There was this little radio spares shop up the road, and they had a little green amplifier in there next to the radios. An Elpico. I twiddled around with it and didn’t know what to do. I tried taking the wires going to the speaker and putting a jack plug on there and plugging it straight into my AC30. It kind of made a weird noise, but it wasn’t what I was looking for.

“I started to get really frustrated, and I said, ‘I know! I’ll fix you!’ I got a single-sided Gillette razorblade and cut round the cone like this [demonstrates slitting from the center to the edge of the cone], so it was all shredded but still on there. I played and I thought it was amazing, really freaky. I felt like an inventor! We just close-miked that in the studio, and also fed the same speaker output into the AC30, which was kind of noisy but sounded good.”

Others, however, will look to Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend, or the Beatles, or credit the first recorded use of a fuzz box in Britain to Big Jim Sullivan’s performance with a custom-built Roger Mayer fuzz on P.J. Probey’s 1964 No. 1 hit single ‘Hold Me’ (according to Mayer himself)—or, supposedly, Bernie Watson’s solo on Screaming Lord Sutch’s ‘Jack The Ripper’ in 1960. Or, a little later, the one more of us remember, Keith Richard’s worldwide smash-hit fuzz riff for the Stones’s ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,’ courtesy of a Maestro Fuzz-Tone.

The Fuzz-Tone connection hints that we need to look further back, and across the pond, for earlier examples of recorded guitar distortion. Gibson, and hence Maestro, was given the circuit that became the Fuzz-Tone by studio engineer Glen Snotty. Snotty, in turn, had devised the transistorized fuzz-generating design to replicate the sound that occurred when a tube preamp in the channel of a mixer he was using to record Grady Martin’s short-scale bass solo for the 1961 Mary Robbins hit record ‘Don’t Worry’ started to fail and yield a distorted tone. Whoever decided to stick with the track rather than re-record it through a properly functional channel was on to something; the result was Nashville’s first recorded fuzz guitar (a Danelectro bass, in fact). Courtesy of Maestro, Snotty’s fuzz circuit soon made the trendy new sound available to the world.

But if Nashville was recording it in 1961, you gotta believe some hipper cats were doing it somewhere a little southwest of there a good few years before.

It’s 1951, a dark, rainy night on the backstreets of Memphis, Tennessee. Ike Turner and His Kings Of Rhythm are packing the gear into the station wagon, getting ready to head off to the studio to record a track for producer Sam Phillips, a track that the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame will one day honor as the first rock and roll song of all time, ‘Rocket 88.’ (Although, distinctly unfairly, the song will be credited to singer Jackie Brenston and the imaginary band ‘His Delta Cats.’) “The amp—a Fender Bassman—was in the trunk of the car and it fell out, right on the road,” Ike Turner told Guitar Magazine’s Rick Batey in 1998, “and it was raining, so the amp got wet. When we got to the studio and plugged it in one of the tubes went ‘pop.’ We didn’t have no more tubes—so that’s where the fuzz came from.’

Rhythm Kings guitarist Willie Kizert’s recording through a failing tweed Fender therefore predates the more talked-about ‘fuzz firsts’ by a good ten years (although he probably did it through a TV-front Pro—a 1x15 like the first Bassmans—or a Super, since the Bassman model didn’t hit the market until 1952). So is that where it all began?

Consideration of this takes us back again to Kink Dave Davies: “The blues players were the first to crank it up, and the music had that spirit, that anguish. We used to listen to all those guys. Like John Lee Hooker—he had that buzz, that drive. I used to listen to him and think, ‘What’s he doing there? That’s amazing—how do you get that sound?’ I think all those elements led to me messing around with amplifiers, because all the amplifiers were clean, soulless.”

Whoever first got the sound down on tape, vinyl, acetate or whatever, it’s hard to imagine that adventurous, pioneering electric guitarists like Charlie Christian, Lonnie Johnson, T-Bone Walker and others didn’t crank up that brown electric suitcase to see just what it could do. Even if they were banned from such sonic mayhem on the bandstand or in the recording studio, you can bet a few juke joints and basement jams rang with the sound of distorted guitar right back into the 1940s and even the ’30s. Do you doubt it? Plug a fat-sounding Gibson ES-150—with its beefy ‘blade’ pickup—into an EH-150 or BR-1 amp wound up to max. Dirty? Damn straight. As for distortion, there are no more ‘firsts’ to be claimed. For sheer variety of sounds, however, the modern guitarist has it all over his predecessors.

Few dispute that, for tonal purity, the best distortion sounds come from cranking up a good tube amp. In particular, those with ears for tonal nuances buried even within a heap of distortion agree that a vintage-style, non-master-volume amp (or good boutique amp with the master up full to effectively take it out of the circuit) driven to the point where the output tubes are beginning to distort offers most players’ dream visions of the perfect overdrive tone.

Not to say that other sounds don’t have their place: the total freakout—sometimes very, very cool in itself—of a second-rate tube amp pushed way past its normal operational capablities; the smooth, pliable, ultra-saturated sound of a cascading gain preamp; the cheesy, buzzy fizz of a cheap tranny amp slammed with too much gain and clipping to beat the band… Any of these can yield the godlike tone of the day in the right application, with the right player. But think Page, Hendrix, SRV, Blackmore, Eric Johnson, Clapton, Van Halen, Gary Moore, and it’s cranked vintage amps and touch that are producing the tone. They were often aided by some type of distortion pedal, sure, because that was the only way to switch textures between verses, choruses and solos, or to push the big amps into distortion at less than full volume. But who wouldn’t choose to get their rock overdrive sound from a 50W 1968 Marshall Plexi on ten, or their blues lead sound from a tweed Bassman on 12, if the ears and the noise police would stand for it? For most players in the broad spectrum of rock, even those usually chained to the back of the stage hacking away at a clean rhythm part, these yield the sweetest, most tactile, touch-sensitive and playable tones available. Get that amp cooking to where the riffs get juicy and fluid and effortless, sustain and harmonic feedback hover into view at the tap of a fret, and the preamp and power amp tubes’ race to keep up with the pick attack lends a comforting softness and compression to the feel (a sensation further enhanced by the natural sag of tube rectification, where present). Mmmm. You can almost feel it now. If we could only get that play-it-all-day vibe at tolerable volume levels, any time we liked.

With this in mind, rather than taking the category chronologically, let’s accept our good fortune in today having all of history’s distortion sounds at our fingertips—so next time out, we’ll look first at those which transform the guitar and amp’s natural tone least, working toward those which balls it up most. In other words, from the least synthetic to the most synthetic-sounding of the genre.

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