This post is dedicated to using pedals for the creation of certain effects. We are not going to cover all effects in one post – you will read more tips in the following publications on the blog – but covering some key pedal effects is exactly what you will see here.
Using foot pedals for overdrive and distortion effects
If you start researching the market of guitar pedals, you will see that basically these pedals are geared to work and produce a very specific type of musical sound (for example, foot pedals for metal or classic rock).
That is why it’s not easy to show you the universal type of a pedal. The most common "inventory" is about three knobs: tone, level and distortion. But depending upon the type of a pedal you can find other specifications and alternations in the parameters.
However, there is good news for you. Not only individual overdrive and distortion pedals are able to produce these effects with your guitar. As these effects are very popular (a little later about that), they are most often available all sorts of multi-effects pedals.
Now why are these effects – overdrive and distortion – so popular? What are they?
Overdrive involves distorting the sound coming from your amp in a form of boosting the signal of your guitar before it enters the amplifier. This is where the overdrive gets created, because a boosted, very big signal, is trying to get through a smaller opening – now you see why this is called an overdrive.
Previously, when this effect was only starting to conquer the minds of guitar players, this effect was achieved by turning the volume on the amp DOWN and the volume on the guitar UP. The effect was easy to perform, but was giving interesting musical alternations to the sound – warm, dirty, beefed up sound. It is simply a boost to the guitar signal without any added tonal coloration which is ok for doing blues and rock.
Distortion is a more intense overdriven sound WITH tonal coloration added to it. As the tonal coloration is added, this creates a huge field for different variants of the distortion – like digital distortion with a more metallic, raspy sound (heavy metal, grunge) or analog tube distortion with rock tone.
For more tips about foot pedals – how to choose the best, how to use them – please read other posts and watch other videos on our blog.
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