Compendium Distortium
As with its sonic cousin Fuzz, Overdrive and Distortion have been two of the most recognizable sounds in popular music for more than half a century. There's nothing, and I mean nothing, that gets folks jamming on their air guitars like the sound of meaty power chords or a searing distorted above-the-octave lead line blaring from a stage or speaker. Overdrive and distortion are the blueprint sound of 1970s rock guitar and many of its contemporary offshoots. And let's be honest, when you plug in, crank it up, and hit a power chord, it's the overdrive or distortion that makes you immediately feel like a damn rock star. The Boss OD-1 (1977) and the Ibanez Tube Screamer (1979) are widely considered the first true overdrive pedals and were widely used and abused by 70s rockers and 80s hard rock and metal guitarists. If you were in a band that wore leather pants or had teased hair and mascara during those eras, you likely had one of those two pedals on your board. The history of overdrive in pop music also dovetails with the history of fuzz which we detailed in a previous primer post, FUZZCYCLOPEDIA. Please check that one out for more historical context. But for now, let's get right into the dirt (pedal!).
WORDS FROM J.F.S.
For EQD lead designer and veteran rock n' roll guitar man Jamie Stillman, the differences between distortion and overdrive pedals aren't great but are essential to the sound and tone you are trying to achieve.
"To me, an overdrive is softer and blends in with the amp more to create a warmer sound. It has more character and doesn't obliterate the tone," he says.
"A typical overdrive circuit uses soft clipping, which adds harmonics and a little grit without totally squaring off the signal. It's like having a rounder and more harmonically pleasing version of your clean tone.”. Examples of soft-clipping overdrives include the aforementioned wildly popular and much imitated Boss OD-1, the Ibanez Tube Screamer, and the Marshall Bluesbreaker (1991).
"Distortion typically uses hard clipping, which squares off the signal more. It delivers more sustain and compression and will produce a heavy tone even if the amp is set to clean," Stillman says.
Iconic hard clippers include the MXR Distortion+ and the DOD Overdrive Preamp 250 and the much-coveted, mystical, magical, and pricey boutique king, the Klon Centaur.
So, to simplify for us non-circuit benders, overdrive tends to be warmer, rounder, and fuzzier and makes your amp sound like it's working harder than it actually is, while distortion is a bit angrier (hard clipping) and is the quickest route to a heavy tone without needing to crank your amp.
Astute long-time pedal perusers will have noticed that many overdrive circuits are based on or inspired by famous amplifiers. Venerated tube amps such as the JCM 800, Vox AC-30, Dumble Overdrive Special, Sunn Model T, and others often turn up in the descriptions of many popular OD pedals.
"All that said, there is a really fine line between most overdrive and distortion pedals. Distortion is usually just anything that has higher gain," Stillman says.
Though it's functionally pretty simple, an overdrive or distortion sound is truly a personal choice. Some players need a fizzy, compressed, and sustained top end for their Boomer-bend laden solos. Other folks prefer chunky, gritty mids for chords, or just a bit of dirt with no low end, so their admirers can still appreciate all the fancy voicings in their exotic chord progressions. Hell, (pun intended) an entire Scandinavian country invented a sub-genre of music, Swedish Death Metal, based primarily on the classic “chainsaw” grind of a fully-dimed Boss HM-2.
When looking for an overdrive or distortion pedal for his board, Stillman has specific needs depending on the style of music. "Generally, I like it to pass the full frequency response without any obvious mid hump. I love the [discontinued] Speaker Cranker for that reason. It has more of a cranked Fender amp character than the more common Marshall-type tone. It's more of a dirty boost and blends into the front end of a tube amp nicely, but it also works great at warming up a solid-state amp which is what it was designed for," Stillman says.
"If I'm going for some crunch for palm muting or soloing, I lean towards something like the Plumes, which accentuates the midrange and tames the low end. It takes all the low-end "woof" out of the signal and produces a tighter sound," he notes.
So what's on Stillman's board?
"My two favorite EQD overdrives are the Speaker Cranker and Plumes. My favorite non-EQD overdrives are the (MXR) Timmy (Overdrive), Zendrive, and pretty much any Fuzz Face with both controls all the way up and the guitar volume rolled back just a little," he said.
THE EARTHQUAKER OVERDRIVES / DISTORTIONS
We currently offer four overdrive/distortion pedals for your creativity and pleasure. We have the muscular, mono-knobbed Acapulco Gold, the much more complex Palisades, the popular meat-and-potatoes grit of the Plumes, and the overdriven-but-not-too-distorted Westwood. Again, as with fuzz, all overdrives are not created equal and fulfill different needs. Are you looking for a mild-mannered pedal to give you that taste of amp breakup without offending any sensitive ears or dominating the other instruments? The Westwood low to medium gain should do you. Want to go straight to sizzling lightly-spitting distortion? Crank the Acapulco Gold's knob all the way to 11 (a.k.a clockwise), and you are suddenly in Tony Iommi territory. Want your power chords to sound like they are making the tubes of your amp scream (wink, wink)? Try one of the many settings on the versatile, multi-voiced Palisades.
You get the idea.
Remember, this is a simple primer. But if any of the following sound clips sound like a pedal (or two) you must add to your rig, please head on over to the pedal's respective product pages for deeper dives into their particulars and some sonic suggestions to get you started.
LOOKING AT SOUND
For hardcore audio types, we offer a few visual representations of what happens to your signal when you start twiddling knobs on your drive/fuzz pedal. In all examples, the input signal is the yellow wave, a 500 Hz sine wave. The bottom purple wave is the output signal being affected. In each example, the specifically named knob is turned from fully counterclockwise to fully clockwise and back, which means at the halfway point of each clip is where the knob is cranked to 10 (sorry, we don't have 11).
For the Plumes, it's the Gain knob that's being manipulated. The other knobs are at noon, and it's using clipping mode 1, which provides more crunch and compression of the signal. The Plumes isn't an especially high gain drive, and you can see that the difference in the sine wave isn't terribly dramatic. But you sure can hear it when you're banging out power chords or tasty licks.
We've got two examples for the Hizumitas as both the Sustain and Tone knobs significantly affect the signal and each other. You can see that the tone doesn't just "shave a little" treble off the top; it's a pretty significant visual and audible change. Alternately, the Sustain knob adds distortion and obviously, sustain with some added compression. You can see at the halfway point where the signal's amplitude is the loudest and most distorted. Pretty cool, eh?
For the Gray Channel, we used the Green Channel setting with the clipping mode set to Si (silicon clipping) and the volume at noon, and again, it doesn't look dramatic, with some rounding off of the signal but again, it's not so much what you see but how the sound melts faces as it emanates from your amp.
METHOD OF OUR MADNESS
We like it straightforward here at Upstairs Bedroom Sound Labs. No fancy mixing boards or vintage-modeled hardware adding "color" or "warmth" to the pedals. What you hear is just the sound of a semi-hollow body Gibson ES-335 style knock-off guitar (that's totally in tune) with some bright humbuckers in the middle position going into the clean channel of a Taxidea Taxus, digital preamp courtesy of Mooer. There's no added gain, so all the sonic meat comes directly from the pedals. Once the pedals do their thing to the guitar signal, it goes into the Twin Reverb 2X12 preset on the Mooer Radar Speaker Cab Simulator and into a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 and Harrison Mixbus 7 32C with no audio cleanup trickery of any kind and only a dash of the Waves Audio TruVerb plugin. We've got some chunka-da-chunka riffs and power chords and arpeggios so you can hear how the notes still articulate through the various pedals. We also have a smattering of low-end sounds from an old Dean semi-hollow body bass for which we can't locate a model number or even a photo of on the entire World Wide Web. So, we'll just call it "vintage."
MEET THE PEDALS
All four of our overdrive/distortion pedals give you a unique sound. Overdrives and fuzz are by far the most mass-produced pedal style, and many of the product pages of boutique pedal makers are filled with varying overdrives, distortions, and fuzzes. Often a maker's "signature" overdrive/distortion is one of the first pedals they ever professionally produced. Consequently, the OD market is perpetually saturated so, picking one (or more) out for yourself and your sound can be daunting. Besides, don't they all do essentially the same thing? Is it even possible to create a genuinely unique overdrive or distortion circuit without adding a bunch of other bells, whistles, knobs, and toggles? Stillman doesn't worry too much about being "original" when it comes to ODs.
"I kind of gave up on trying anything unique in a broad sense. I just go for something that sounds good to me and is unique within the EQD line," Stillman says.
"I was pretty bent on making sure the full spectrum of frequencies are passed, but I'm not so tied to that rule after working on the Palisades. I design a lot of dirt circuits, and about 2% of them get turned into EQD products. I'm always looking for something different for my own personal use. If I find it to be particularly exciting, it becomes an EQD thing," he says.
Acapulco Gold
Speaking of pedals inspired by famous amps, the Acapulco Gold is modeled on the classic Sunn Model T, and the idea is caveman simple; “pedal make amp sound mean!” The AG's big ol' single knob affects the output volume, meaning it's either cranked or not. Any and all subtleties in the guitar’s tone must come from your manipulation of the guitar's controls.
Palisades
This big, versatile stompbox isn't modeled on a famous amp but rather one of the most renowned and occasionally maligned overdrive circuits in existence. Just as nearly all pedal makers have at least one Big Muff-inspired fuzz, Ibanez's TS-808 Overdrive, a.k.a The Tube Screamer has been one of the most popular and most modded overdrive pedals since its introduction in the late 1970s as an answer to the equally oft-copied Boss OD-1 and MXR Distortion+. In the Palisades, players get a smorgasbord of Tube Screamer-inspired tones. It offers six different clipping voices and five bandwidth settings that are all highly interactive. Additionally, there are two gain channels with volume, a separate boost, and a buffer. Our buddy Nick Reinhart at Pedals & Effects calculated that nearly 500 tonal options are available from the Palisades for the tone-tweak obsessed.
Plumes
EQD's very popular and tight-budget-friendly small-signal shredding overdrive pedal. It's got a switch for three different clipping voices, making it quite versatile and able to work with any guitar, bass, and amplifier. It can also give a synth or acoustic and electronic percussion a nice layer of musical grit.
Westwood
a.k.a The Translucent Drive Manipulator. What does that mean? Well, it means that the Westwood is a light to medium gain drive. In other words, this is probably not the pedal for your Drop C# tuned DOOOM band. However, that doesn't mean it can't dig up some good dirt from your amp head or combo amp. It's got simple bass and treble controls, a drive control, and a level control that can wake the neighbors when cranked.
STILL MORE!
So there you have it, EarthQuaking Pedal People: a quick, easy and dirty primer on the blurred EQD line of overdrives and distortions. These days pop music is filled with tuned sub-kicks, heavily manipulated samples, and Autotune. And, pedal makers are constantly expanding the capabilities of reverbs, delays, and modulation pedals. But the sound of an overdriven or distorted guitar or any instrument is still a popular, much sought after sound and not just by Boomers and metalheads. Why?
"I wish I knew the answer. Then I could stop building dirt circuits," Stillman says.
"It just sounds exciting to me. There are so many wild sounds that can be made now, but nothing sounds cooler to me than a Strat on the neck pickup with the volume rolled back running into a Fuzz Face. That probably makes me sound old, but it's still such a good sound. It may just be familiarity."
Malcolm X Abram is a recovering reporter and music writer and a proud 40 year guitar noodler. He lives, works and plays in the bucolic dreamland of Akron, Ohio in an old house with two dogs who don’t really like each other and way too many spiders.