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290 Part V: Gearing Up: Outfitting Your Arsenal TEAM LinG
Unlike rock, blues tends not to be on the cutting edge of electronic technology
but adopts aspects of it after the technology goes mainstream. So a
modern blues player must be aware of new technology trends but respectful
of the traditional sound they’re responsible for upholding.
The following sections take you on a tour of guitar effects, according to what
they do to your guitar sound. Effects that boost and distort your signal (the
electronic impulses coming from your guitar before they become sound) are
different than the ones that adjust the treble and bass, which are different
from those that imbue your sound with ambient effects like reverberation
and echo. This chapter helps you organize effects and make decisions on
whether you can use them to play your particular brand of blues.
Juicing Up Your Sound
When you juice up your sound, you use gain-based effects. In electronic
terms, gain refers to the signal strength or how much power is being pumped
through your system. Typically, the higher the gain, the louder the sound you
hear through your speakers, but you can influence the level with a master
volume, which controls the overall loudness. High gain is a good thing, because
a healthy signal keeps away noises that plague low-level signals or weak powered
notes. But gain doesn’t just make things louder. It also changes the bass
and treble characteristics in certain ways that are considered pleasing in
some musical situations.
When your sound is too hot
to handle: Distortion
If you boost your guitar signal so that it’s too powerful, or hot, for the amp to
handle, distortion results, and the sound that comes through the speaker
appears broken up compared to the incoming signal. Distortion is normally a
bad thing in electronics, except in electric guitar tone. In this special case,
distortion has a pleasing, useful, and musical effect. Distortion can be
referred to by other names, like fuzz, overdrive, break-up, warmth, but it’s all
distortion, technically speaking.
Describing the tonal differences between the countless types of guitar distortion
is tricky, but you can generally break gain-based distortion effects down
into two categories:
Those that seek to provide the realistic effect of driving an amp hard
Those that go for over-the-top, buzz-saw, and synthetic-sounding effects —
never mind the realism