Guitar All-in-One For Dummies by Hal Leonard Corporation & Mark Phillips & Desi Serna

Author:Hal Leonard Corporation & Mark Phillips & Desi Serna [Chappell, Jon & Phillips, Mark & Serna, Desi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119734055
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2020-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

Distortion and sustain

When the six-string Dr. Frankensteins of the 1930s and ’40s were electrifying their guitars, they weren’t envisioning what Jimi Hendrix would do decades later at Woodstock and Monterey. Just like the well-meaning doctor in Mary Shelley’s novel, early electronic guitar designers were wholesome and good. They wanted to reproduce the sound of the acoustic guitar as faithfully as possible. Fortunately for us, they failed miserably. But electronics’ loss was music’s gain, because even though the electric guitar sound was nothing like the acoustic sound — or the acoustic guitar sound as heard through a microphone — it had a very pleasing, and musically useful, quality.

The effort to produce an exact amplified match of the original acoustic guitar failed primarily because it introduced distortion (an untrue representation of the sound) into the sound. The louder the sound, or the more the guitar “worked” the electronic circuitry, the more distorted the sound got. As the electronic signal “heated up,” the sound became fuzzier (where the high frequencies became more muted), and the tone generally warmed up (sounding more rounded and less brittle). All this distortion increased the sustain (the tendency for the tone to ring indefinitely at the same level), which was noticeable in even the lowest of volumes.

Distortion, normally a bad thing in just about any other electronic endeavor, had a beneficial, musical effect for guitar tone. As the guitar became thought of more and more as a lead instrument, guitarists found they could work the distortion factor to their advantage. A louder guitar wasn’t just louder — it had a different, better tonal quality than a guitar coming out of the same apparatus, but at a lower volume.

This timbre (a fancy musical term for tone, or sound quality), distortion, and increased sustain took the plunkiness out of the guitar’s tone, and made it more smoothly melodic — more like the buzzy, reedy qualities of, say, a saxophone or a blues vocalist, which is why so many early rock guitarists cut their musical teeth on the blues. Whereas the guitar had formerly been a rhythm instrument, owing to its clipped sound, rapid decay (the quality of a sound to die away), and strident tone, the “electronic” guitar now had properties more suited to melody-making. The guitar was poised to step out of the background and up to the spotlight itself. All it needed was some brave souls to tame this new sonic monster.

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