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→A Brief History of Distortion
== A Brief History of Distortion ==
=== Early Experimental Distortion Techniques ===
Early amps weren't designed to produce thick, saturated distortion. Many artists discovered the phenomenon by accident, using amplifiers that were damaged in transport. Some purposefully altered their amplifiers by doing things such as loosening tubes or poking holes in their speakers. Others cranked up their amps as high as they would go, producing a mild overdrive. As the peaks of waveform exceed the amp's maximum output, the peaks would be compressed, or clipped, creating a more square-wave type waveform, which is the equivalent of adding lots of harmonic overtones.
=== Overdrive ===
Once artists and manufacturers began to appreciate distorted tones, they found various ways to create them (without irreversibly damaging an amp or speakers). The simplest was to push an amplifier beyond its designed maximum output, creating an ''overdrive'' distortion, by running the amplifier at full volume. This could be pushed further by using a high-output humbucking pickup. These were the earliest ways of achieving overdrive distortion. It would later be revisited in the 70's by using solid-state distortion pedals to boost the signal in front the amp, pushing amps much further into overdrive. Amp manufacturers also realized the potential desirability of overdrive distortion, designing their amps to overdrive more easily and with a smoother, more consistent, less noisy distortion.
=== Fuzz/Dirt/Distortion Pedals ===Overdrive was originally reserved for a mild distortion, but artists wanted more. Enter early solid-state distortion pedals: ''fuzzboxes''. These things produced a harsh, noisy, "dirty" distortion but offered artists a much greater degree of distortion. Solid state pedals would evolve more and more, getting away from fuzz and offering more tube-like distortion, in the form of overdrive and distortion pedals. === High-Gain Amps ===In the early 80's, amps started to incorporate heavy tube overdrive in the pre-amp section using the smaller pre-amp tubes, with variable gain/drive controls. This allowed real tube overdrive, without having to crank volume to ear-bleeding levels. These started the modern trend of ''high-gain amps''. Various refinements were made, such as cascading gain stages across multiple tubes, offering heavy, saturated distortion without compromising control and minimizing noise and other unwanted warts. === Modelers ===Most recently, companies are developing digital devices using algorithms to emulate various pedals and amps (including pre-amp and power amp tube distortion). This allowed artists access to a greater range of combinations of pedals and amps and experimentation that would be impossible in real life - things like running amps at full volume with the tubes in class A operation biased as hot as possible or daisy chaining multiple amps.
== Overdriving the Amp ==