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.

GUITAR ARTISTS WITH GREAT TONE PT.III

Finally, the last part of "Guitar Artists with Great Tone" post! Hopefully you already made some guesses on the artist that I will mention on this post.

I won't mention his name, but I'll mention some interesting facts about him.

He uses mainly Stratocasters.

He's from Austin, Texas.

He's 56 years old.

He had his own Signature Strat.

He uses Fender and Marshall amps mostly.

Any guesses? I'll give you some more hints:

He played an old ES-335 and Les Paul as well.

He suffered from a tone OCD.

He sometimes sings.

Is it clear now?

Anyway, our latest guitar artist with the greatest tone(in my opinion, of course) is

....(drum roll)....

Eric Johnson (applause)

In my opinion, he's the man with the tone and feel. He adapt his playing closely to his tone. He's surely not a shredder but his melody lines are pretty good and difficult to play.

He uses mainly his signature Fender Stratocaster which is based on early Stratocaster during the '50s and '60s. The newer signature Eric Johnson has rosewood fingerboard with modified pickups. His amps are Marshall Plexi 50/100W and Fender Twin Reverb. He's a very big fan of '70s Echoplex tape echo. He uses Tube Screamer and Dallas Arbiter Fuzz Face as well as Deluxe Memory Man.

He has three main sounds: clean rhythm, a bit dirty rhythm and a full lead tone. His clean sound is sometimes boosted with a Dyna Comp. It's the cleanest clean sound ever with a very rich harmonics with little bit of delay and chorus; it's based on Fender amp. His rhythm tone is a classic Stevie Ray Vaughan type of sound with the help of Fender amp combined with additional gain box such as TS, very glassy and bluesy and very good for chord works. His lead tone is based on Eric Clapton's Cream-era lead tone that comes mainly from an overdriven Marshall Plexi amp and sometimes together with the Fuzz Face.

This guy really shapes his playing to suit his tone. He has a very good chording technique with some hybrid picking involved. Also he is very good with arpeggiated lead notes. Most of the time he involves some jazz licks together with blues based scale. Very non-traditional playing with influences ranging from Hendrix to SRV.

He's famous for his "tone OCD". He tweaks his gears frequently just to get the right tone. His perception of tone is very high above the standard and that results in amazing smooth fat warm tone that is really the best in my opinion compared to any other guitar artists.

Definitely check out his classic "Ah Via Musicom" album and his newest recording "Up Close" and listen to some of his songs to experience the best guitar tone ever recorded. Not just the tone, the fingers are also great on those albums, some songs are hard to nail!!

I hope you enjoy this post as much as I do and I hope that you can gain some knowledge from these series of discussion post. I will come up with more discussion post along with more review of some cool vintage-y guitar gears :)

Cheers and God bless :)

MXR M103 BLUE BOX

Double octave down

I checked out this pedal right after I realized that Paul Gilbert used this pedal on his signal chain to produce that crazy massive monstrous tone that he used before he starts crazy tapping(see his live videos on youtube, he always uses this pedal right before Eudaimonia Overture song starts). It sounds crazy and I figured that I should try one and imitate that craziness on my signal chain. I also figured out that Jimmy Page used this pedal long time ago on one of Led Zeppelin's song.

It's basically an octave fuzz pedal. Different from Octavia or any regular vintage octave fuzz pedal. This one generates two octaves down; it has blend knob so you can control the amount of dry/wet signal that's coming out.

How does it sound?

Just like Paul Gilbert on the video that I watched haha! I got that crazy monster tone, but I didn't get the Eudaimonia Overture tapping lick *sad*. To be honest, this pedal is only good for that monster tone, but you can't really use it for regular playing because once you start doing that, it'll sound so muddy, overly-compressed and lifeless.

The fuzz is not really that sweet, this is intended for someone with experimental attitude that has the courage to explore this wild tone and make it into something useful. Maybe you can use this to get a synth-like sound out of your signal chain, but to be honest this won't do the job perfectly as other synth based pedal on the market(micro POG, POG, whammy pedal).

Strange pedal I must say

It has some sort of analog tracking circuitry, sometimes it can generates up to 2 octaves down when you play high enough but if you play on the lower notes then sometimes you'll get only 1 octave down. Even sometimes what comes out from this thing is only random note-less fuzziness. It's quite unpredictable !!

Anyway, this pedal is a true bypass(almost......but the tone sucking doesn't really bother pups with output of 140mV and above) and it's simple enough to understand the features that this thing has. Place it in the front of your signal chain, preferably after the compressor so you can use the output knob to adjust the amount of bad fuzz coming out of this thing.

Beware

Some people complained about the low output level of this pedal even if the output knob is cranked all the way. That doesn't happen to me but if it happens, just follow my suggestion to put it in the very front of your signal chain.

Also beware that this pedal contains it's own version of some noise gate circuitry inside. Try to play a sustained note from your guitar and you will hear how "digital" the sound is when the note starts to fade. YIKES!

Does it worth?

Retail price below $80.00. I say it really depends on your purpose of putting this pedal to your signal path. If you have the courage to make this strange pedal works on your guitar playing, then it's not really too bad. If you look for something that's easy to tame and frequently used, this guy won't match your taste. If you just want to imitate that Paul Gilbert lick or Jimmy Page guitar solo, it's worth a try, but maybe this pedal won't last long on your pedal board.

From 0 to 10

This also depends a lot. I would pull a middle line and say it's around 7.3. To be honest, I'm a little bit disappointed with how it overall sounds. It's too compressed and has some artificial tone quality that I really try to avoid. I'm not saying this is a bad or useless pedal; it all really depends on our skill to tame this weird pedal to work our way. As I said on my previous post, a good player can even make a thin metal box sounds good to your ears.

Cheers and God bless :) !

p.s. Starting mid August, I will edit most of the posts and we can have links to audio clip containing dry guitar sound vs guitar sound with related pedal engaged. Stay tuned !