(smooth guitar playing)
(distorted guitar playing)
- Hey, it's John Dreyer, and we are going to talk
about clean tone and distorted tone.
You may hear words like overdrive, or dirty, or distortion.
What does those words mean,
how do you achieve those tones,
and how can you use them?
All right, let's start with clean tone.
So clean tone simply refers to a guitar tone
with no overdrive or distortion,
a true, clean amplification of your guitar.
You hit a chord,
the pickups send that signal to the output jack,
the output jack goes to your amplifier,
and your amplifier makes that sound louder.
It's a tone you'll hear in jazz, country,
blues, funk, a lot of different genres.
All right, so this is my clean tone.
No overdrive, no distortion,
just a little bit of reverb from the amp.
It can still be a clean tone with reverb.
So with your guitar, if you have multiple pickups,
like I do here, I have two humbucking pickups,
you can get different types of clean tones
with the different pickup combinations.
So here is the bridge pickup clean,
this is really cool to play some chords or single notes.
(clean guitar playing)
All right, here is the combination,
the bridge pickup and the neck pickup, clean,
cool for a funkier type tone.
(funky guitar playing)
And then we can go to the neck pickup,
in this case we do have the humbucking pickup in the neck,
this is really nice for a jazz type tone.
(jazzy guitar playing)
Now I'm ready to add distortion.
Now, I can do this in a couple of different ways.
One, since I'm playing through
this awesome Deluxe Reverb tube amp,
I can just simply crank the amp, crank the volume,
and it'll naturally break up and distort,
so let's check that out.
(distorted guitar playing)
Now, everyone loves a cranked tube amp, especially me,
but it can be kinda loud.
Even at 22 watts, cranking this Deluxe Reverb
shakes the walls a little bit.
But we can lower the amp volume and add a gain pedal,
like an overdrive, distortion, or fuzz pedal,
and get the same result.
So I'm actually gonna turn the volume of the amp
down to a more comfortable level,
and then I'll add a couple of different pedals.
I have a Santa Ana Overdrive,
and then I have a Full Moon Distortion,
we can hear what those sound like through the amp.
All right, here's the bypass tone, pedal is not on yet.
(clean guitar playing)
Santa Ana on.
(slightly distorted guitar playing)
So you can hear that it's not a very heavy distortion,
it's more of a subtle overdrive.
It works well into a clean amp,
or you can drive a distorted amp
even further into higher gain.
All right, so now let's go back to the Full Moon Distortion.
Again, here's my bypass tone.
(clean guitar playing)
And here's the Full Moon.
(heavily distorted guitar playing)
All right, so a little bit more gritty,
a little more grind, a little heavier gain.
Works well for rock, soloing, heavy metal, what have you.
All right, so that is the difference
between a clean and distorted tone.
Have fun experimenting at home with whatever gear you have,
pedals, guitars, amps, different combinations.
Lots of great information available over at fender.com
if you have any other questions.
Stay tuned for more videos, and we'll see you soon.
(heavy guitar playing)