SATURATION

In this post, I want to explain a little bit about different kind of saturation on guitar tone. Familiar with the word distortion, fuzz or overdrive? If you had heard any of these words before, then you'll probably understand most of the content of this post. Let's get started!

Clipping

A saturated guitar signal is basically an amplified guitar signal that's boosted until it reaches clipping(above the range of signal tolerance). While some electrical engineers think that clipping is bad, some guitarists think that getting a clipped guitar signal on an amplifier is the best thing they ever heard. Most rock guitarist rely heavily on saturated tones. Whether it's a crunch rhythm, singing sustained lead, boosted clean-break up or fuzzy creamy tones, they're all basically clipped guitar signal.

Achieving clipped signal

There are multiple ways of reaching saturation. One is by driving an amp or running the amp volume as high as it can be. This works well especially on tube amps. Some amps don't have the capability to reach clipping without being driven prematurely, this leads to the invention of preamplifier that contains tubes or solid state components that will boost the signal before it enters the amplifier so that clipping can be achieved without pushing the amp volume too high. This kind of saturation is called amp-overdrive.

Other way is by using boost pedal on a clean sounding amplifier. The benefit of using pedal to achieve clipping is that it can emulate the sound of amp-overdrive at even lower volume level. People sometimes use pedals on an already driven-amp to achieve a higher level of distortion.

Types of saturation

There are three types of saturation that are common:

Overdrive

Overdrive signal will usually sound pretty open, the clipping isn't too much and it doesn't break too much from the clean signal. This is the type of sound that you can get from amp-overdrive. You can also achieve this sound by using common overdrive pedal such as Tube Screamer or similar stuffs. This sound can be found mostly on blues and some classic rock songs.

Distortion

This is the sound that defines rock and metal music. Distorted signal comes from stacked amps that are already on overdrive state. The sound that it generates is very compressed, heavy, crunchy and clips even more compared to overdriven signal. Modern amplifiers are sometimes high-gain, meaning that it can achieve distortion without having to be stacked. People can even achieve this using distortion pedal on clean channel or even using overdrive on dirty channel. You'll be surprised that sometimes people combine two overdrive pedals to create a smooth distortion sound. Metal player usually cut the midrange of their tone to get even crunchier and tighter distortion; lead rock guitarist will boost the midrange to get more body out of the distortion.

Fuzz

Fuzz is the most clipped signal compared to distortion and overdrive. It can be achieved using any fuzz pedal that contains germanium diode. This kind of sound was starting to emerge on the '60s and '70s thanks to Jimi Hendrix. People sometimes combine an already dirty amp with the fuzz pedal to achieve higher gain guitar tone that can sing and sustain the notes better.