8,720
edits
Changes
m
no edit summary
The most important part of getting a rock guitar tone is achieving the right distortion that you want. This certainly depends on the amp (or stompbox) you are using; however, I want to stress how to tweak different distortion tones from the same device. Dialing in the desired distortion is often nowhere near as simple as turning the "drive" or "gain" parameter until the sound is as saturated as you like. A typical guitar rig will involve 4 main possible distortion stages - stomp box, pre-amp, power amp, and speaker, and you generally use one as your "main" distortion stage. However, any stage being pushed to breakup will distort in a certain way depending on the nature of the signal sent to it. This section mostly discusses what ways to expect a stage to breakup and how to alter the signal before reaching that stage to get the distortion you want.
The output of each distortion stage also depends on the waveform of the signal fed into it. Even if we were to EQ a guitar, banjo, violin, and piano signal to have roughly the same frequency response, the distortion produced by any particular distortion stage would have drastically different tones. For guitar, this is helpful, because we can alter a guitar signal before it hits a distortion stage, by using other distortion effects, modulation effects such as phasers, chorus, or flanger, time-effects such as reverb or delays, filter effects such as synths, and pitch effects such as octavers. This is a lot of ground to cover, so I'm not getting into it here, other than touching upon using multiple layers of distortion.
While most devices can be tweaked to provide a wide range of distortion tones as identified below, each amp or distortion pedal has a relatively similar response or signature characteristic that is difficult to dial out and difficult to emulate on other gear. In other words, a Marshall will still sound Marshall-y with a Tube Screamer in front, but you can hear that there's a Tube Screamer in front. Similarly, you can't make a Marshall sound like a Mesa/Boogie just by putting some EQ on the incoming tone. Consider pre-EQ'ing more of a fine-tuning process, even though in some instances you are drastically altering the tone. You want to start by choosing the right amp or distortion effect. This requires seeing the potential in an amp even if you think it initially sounds "off". You have to ask yourself questions like, "What if it sounded less muddy?" or "What if I could get the grittiness out the tone?"
== Types of Distortion ==
I like to lump distortion tones into 3 broad categories. This is a bit different than the [[Tone#Dirt, Distortion, and Fuzz Pedals|distortion pedal types listed earlier]]. Distortion pedals tend to be designed to distort only a certain way. This is more about how tube overdrive can be tweaked to sound different ways. While pedals also have flexibility, they tend to get quite nasty outside their "comfort zone", while tubes are a bit more versatile. That's not to say that tubes trump solid state pedals outright - in fact, they can be combined to get the best of both worlds as seen [[#Mixing Multiple Distortions|below]].