Overdrive, Distortion and Fuzz day 21

Imagine a guitar signal as waves drawn on paper.  Sharp mountain looking waves.  In Overdrive, these waves are rounded off.  They are squished, or compressed, and this creates fat, rounded hills rather than jagged waves.  They are fat sounding, and full of new harmonics and multiple frequencies in the same area.  You get your guitar's tone, but also just a bit of dirty signal.  You can either increase your guitar signal into the amp and overdrive the tubes in the pre-amp, or you can push the amp's volume to louder than it is meant to go and get a power amp overdrive tone.  This really decreased the lives of the early tubes(not to mention it made audiences deaf).  Later, players wanted to be able to do this all the time, so they created pedals that would boost the signal before it got into the amp.  This would guarantee overdrive, these were the first Overdrive/boost pedals.

After the pedals came to be used, players found that you could REALLY push that signal through and it would distort the sound into a crunchy, broken up sort of sound.  They created pedals or modded amps so they you could puts large amounts of gain through a tubed amplifier, and this created Distortion.  It is enough overdrive to lose some of the characteristics of the guitar your playing, but it created enough rich harmonic overtones that it still sounded musical.

One day someone went mad, and said "what if we just cascade the signal on top of itself in a pedal and caused it to get so broken that you can barely even hear the original guitar's sound" and low and behold, Fuzz was born.  Fuzz can get so strong that you practically can't hear the original guitar signal put into it, but it creates a nice, enveloping fuzzy pattern that still responded to the guitar player.

So as you can see, Overdrive, Distortion, and Fuzz are all related, and are almost steps in a sequence.  Its a bit of light, medium and heavy "dirt".  In a later post, I will explain why distortion is such a problem for bassists.  Hint: it has to do with that flat line in the picture at the start.  That flat line sucks.


Day 21

I went back into the lessons today and did the Double Stop lesson.  This is yet another guitar thing that I had heard of that I had never really learned what it was.  Turns out, I knew what it was, and I did a whole hell of a lot of it with playing bass lines.  Its just that I knew it as droning.  I am kind of let down by what it is, because it sounds more interesting than it is.  It is just two notes played at the same time and typically is not part of a chord.  Now, I'm not sure if doing a octave thing with it counts as being a double stop, but I do that a lot too, its one of the reasons I took to playing Everlong pretty easily.

Which is kind of funny.  I already knew how to do power chords because of the Green Day songs I had learned years ago.  I already knew how to do the octave parts because, well, I like to do octaves on bass, I've been doing that for years.  So the only real part that was holding me back on Everlong were the thought that it would be too difficult, and the Drop D tuning, which I never did before.

Today I also started playing with the Pentatonic major.  I have to say after playing tons of the minor scale lately, I really like the sound of the major.  For some reason it makes me want to make slower, soft rock music.  I had to record a little piece I came up with while just practicing it.  I've not memorized completely the pattern yet, but I'll be working on doing that for a while.  Repetition, it can get boring, but its the only way to learn.