Hey, how ya doin, Justin here. Today we're going to talk a bit about gain, crunch,
overdrive, distortion, fuzz. What are all of these things? Are they the same?
A few basic things that we need to understand if you're gonna get in to
playing any sort of rock or using any sort of distortion. Most beginners will want
to experiment with it at some point, so I thought I'd give you a bit of a run
down about the basic things that you might wanna know, about the different types
kinda how it works. Actually using a kemper profiler for this video.
I'm using a profile by a guy called Michael Brit, who makes I think the best
Kemper profiles that are available currently, and I'm using the 69 Marshall
50 G5T setting, but I've turned the gain down so it's a fairly clean sound.
Little, tiny little distortion, but it's pretty. Especially if I play lightly, if I
really, ya know thrash it, there's a little bit of distortion startin' to
happen there but not much. Lets just put on a bit of distortion boss ds1
You can hear straight away that its a different sound, there's something else
goin on there, its a lot thicker, ya know its kinda like Metallica or Black Sabbath
or whatever, that's the kind of ya know sound that you're getting.
The differentiation between clean or the dirty could be that extreme, but there are
many variables in between, if you're playing blues, you'll probably want some
sort of bit of overdrive, but ya might not want like a really heavy fuzz.
So lets start by talking a bit about the guitar, now i've picked this particular
killer guitar because it's got a humbucker in the bridge but it's a splitable
humbucker, so it can also sound like a single quo, like a ya know a regular
single pick up, just by turning this control I can move between the two
different sounds and I thought it'd be worth just without putting any pedals on
just so you can hear the difference, so I'm just using the bridge.
Generally if you're playing the kind of rock guitar thing you're likely to be
using the bridge. The other pickups are definitely usable too, depending on the
circumstance, but it would seem to me that the most of the time ya get the most kind
of nice crunchy sound by using the bridge pick up. Now it's currently on the
humbucker mode. If I now slide that back to the single quo mode you can hear it's
a bit different. The humbucker. Single quo So there's already a big difference there
so if you wanna play a lot of rock guitar then you might wanna be leaning toward a
guitar with a humbucker that's like the two pickups right next to eachother
a humbucker gets its name because when you have a single coil and a lot of a
distortion it can get a bit noisy and you get a lot of sort of background hum
and the humbucker eliminates some of that which is why it's kinda popular for people
using a lot of distortion these days there are single quo's that don't have as much
noise problems, they used to but still may be there a little bit, so when we come
to talk about the different types of distortion they have a different kind of
character or different flavor and as I beginner I wouldn't be worrying too much
about it I think maybe by the end of this you'll probably settle a little bit on
which ones you kinda like and what you like the sound of. I think probably the
best thing for a beginner is to get some sort of multi-effects thing. I always feel
like the best beginner amp is this Boss Katana it's got all of the effects
built in so as a beginner you don't have to buy lots of pedals or try out different
stuff. It's there for you to try you can flick very easily between distortion and
overdrive and blues driver and crunch and ya know explore what those different
things mean and then later on down the line you might wanna go invest in ya know
super boutiquey pedals the costly the whatever, but I've got boss pedals
that I bought as a teenager and they're still goin strong, they're great quality
and ya know this isn't a Boss ad but they do make really great pedals if you're
starting out and the katana I think is a really good way of exploring all of the
different pedals in one unit so you get a bit of better of an idea of what it is
that you like. Now the pedals that I've picked for today, the first one is a tube
screamer mini. Now I've been muckin around with this board for ages in fact i've
got an original old tube screamer right here which I originally set up but ya know
you won't find one of those unless you've prepared to stump up a few hundred quip on
ebay and this really tube screamer mini is the one I take out when I'm doing like
overseas gigs or anything like that it sounds incredible and is relatively
cheap. So I've put that one on there so we can hear, it's kind of like a mid boost
tube screamer type pedals boost the middle frequency of the sound alright let me just
I'll actually just play it a little bit so you can, so here's the clean sound again
and then tube screamer, now I've only got the distortion down a little bit
there so if I turn it up a bit, now actually I'll talk a little bit about the
controls here too that what we've got goin on, so this big one is the amount of
distortion that we've got here, now on the older tube screamer the knobs are all
pretty much the same size they've been shrunk down for this mini one but we've
got tone which is a really important thing with a gain in particularly we've cranked
the gain up a little bit. If we turn the tone down so like toward 9 o'clock or
6 o'clock it's almost like what distortion sounds like in the room next door if your
neighbor was playing, all the top end has kind of disappeared. If we go the other
extreme so turning it right around the other way, it's a lot brighter and sharper
just those extremes again, very round very sharp, possibly a bit too sharp in
this case. A little bit fiddley having the knob there but you don't tend to fiddle
with them that much, once you've got a setting that you like you tend to leave it
fairly steady most of the time. Now the level control you often use to kind of
back the volume down a little bit because the difference between having a distortion
and the clean sound can be a bit extreme so you can use the level control to bring
the overall volume back down so that they're similar, sometimes you'd want
distortion as a boost but sometimes you wouldn't want to suddenly get crazy loud
when you kick the distortion on. That's about there for the level so by turning
the level up you can use it as a boost like if you were doing a guitar solo
generally speaking I try and set the level so it's about the same when the pedal is
on and off, um things are a little different with the kemper as well compared
to going to a real amp, but I find that the jumps in volume are as extreme but
anyway we're getting into fussy stuff, now the thing with the tube screamer is it
boosts the middle of the sound a little bit so it's great for solo's if you've got
other distortions and you'd want to go for a solo turning that level up, the the the
tube screamer really pokes through they sound particularly great with
marshall style amplifiers maybe slightly less so with fenders but I mean that's
ya know a very debatable thing and very much a choice thing. The thing with the
tube screamer is sort of a crunchy sound it tends to boost the input going into
the amplifier so it makes the amp work a little bit harder, and that's kind of a
characteristic on it's own. See that if I back the distortion off here a little bit
Let me turn the tone up, you get a kind of more of a blues. turn it up a touch one
more time. So it's kind of not heavy metal like.
It's a bit more maybe ACDC, like kind of that sound more than like heavy metal
so that's a tube screamer. The next one that i've picked for today is the DS1
the Boss pedal just because it's really distortioned and if I kick it on you'll
get. That's gonna be better for the things like a metallica or that kind of stuff
I've got the distortion up pretty high it's got a very different sound to the
tube screamer, or even if I crank the tube screamer. Very useful depends and this is
why you end up with a lot of different distortion units. There's all of these
different kind of flavors you get depending on what it is that you wanna
play, the sort of sound you wanna make the style of the songs. I don't know how
many distortion pedals I've got probably 30 or 40 different pedals and each one's
got a slightly different characteristic and I'll love it for a little while and
then I'll find another one and then I'll love that one for a bit and then I'll go
back to an older one and you float around depending on the things that you want
but this is again one of those reasons why I think as beginners its good to get a
grounding of all of the different types of distortion pedals , so you kinda get
more familiar with what it is you really like. Now the third pedal I have picked
for little demo is the Nobels ODR-1, which is a fantastic pedal it's so regularly on
my board, it's relatively cheap and it's got a real wide range of things that it
can do. Um I think it's a, yeah, it's real good, really good. So there's a kind of a
crunchy thing, but you can crank that drive right up, crank the spectrum up too
really broad, it really is a great pedal there are so many different sounds in that
little thing a lot of it's a little bit gonna be about tweaking pedals so, uh it's
very awkward to say to someone you should use exactly these settings or ya know, you
can have a bit of a rough guide I guess but it really makes a big difference on
the amp that you're using, the guitar that you're using, how high output your pickups
are what pickups you're using all of those things make a really huge difference, so
while you might find that you can get rough settings from somewhere, it doesn't,
it's not quite the same thing, these days of course a lot of digital software people
are using like the Kemper you can get whole presets same with
the Katana you can get lots of good presets that you can download for the
Katana so you get the whole sound all in one with all of the effects, that can be a
super useful thing, um again, not just to make life easy for yourself and have an
instant sound but to be able to look at what the settings are that make up that
preset, and then learning how to tweak them a bit so you understand a little bit
more about the whole process, that's something that I would definitely
recommend that you'll get into doing. Now the last pedal that I've popped on my
board here is my DanDrive Austin Pride. Uh probably the sexiest pedal that I've got
and worth more than these pedals combined at least, uh, beautiful fuzz pedal, I
thought I'd give you a bit of an idea of what the fuzz thing's all about, it's,
fuzz is like really distorted there are dif- you don't have to use it that way but
that's probably it's most a defining characteristic is it's like it feels like
it's squeezed and trying to get out it's quite an impressive sound I love this
it's, you can hear this noise as well, fuzz is a different beast, it's I dont
recommend fuzz for beginners frankly, I think if you're learning to play guitar,
you're better off tryna get used to overdrive and distortion first of all fuzz
is it takes a little bit of taming ya to really learn to control the things like
open strings ringin out, can cause a lot of problems when you're using fuzz, so
fuzz probably isn't you're best starting point for any of that. So I wouldn't start
going near fuzz, I love fuzz, I'm a big fuzz fan but probably not the best
beginner option. Depending on what type of pedal you're gonna get you're gonna
have different controls, some of them more simple and others I've got here one of the
other ones I was thinking of pulling out is an original Boss OD-1 the original
overdrive pedal that only has level and overdrive no tone control on it at all
other pedals this is a Boss blues driver, a keenly moded one, which has an
additional switch on it and its got that kind of, the most common thing that you're
gonna see is the amount of distortion, tone and level, most distortion pedals are
gonna have that kind of thing fuzz pedals have got a whole heap of other different
things because there's different types of transistors that they use to create the
fuzz, and there's the biasing and there's all sorts of other stuff that goes on with
fuzz pedals but most distortion you're gonna have those three things, I just
noticed here on the Nobels here we've got level and drive but the middle one instead
of tone it's called spectrum, uh some of them have a different mid control uh like
the Boss Medal there's another one that's got lots of different controls on it, um,
there really are so many gain pedals available, and trying to choose one is
going to be a bit difficult if you'renot really sure what you're looking for, so
like I said I'd recommend either getting a few cheaper pedals, ya know I massively
rate the Boss range just because they last forever, they sound generally really good
the ODR-1 great first choice, the tube screamer mini great first choice, so a
little bit of it is up to the sound you want to make, what amp you've got
think about that a little bit, you can of course get distortion in the amp,
something that I probably should've mentioned earlier if you've got a valve
amplifier, and you turn the volume right up and the master volume right down,
you'll get yourself some distortion, and that can be a great thing, real valve
distortion is generally, is generally preferred to using pedals, you could boost
an already distorted tube amp quite pleasingly and some people would prefer
the sound of pedals always for indoor clean amp, I've always felt like I like
the crunch that I get from a real amp being driven a little bit hard, that said
I'm using a Kemper for this lesson just because of the massive convenience factor
I'm sure a few of you are using plugins and those kind of you know digital things
in the digital realm that you can get presets for, I really encourage you to
not just use the presets but go and look inside them what's makin up the thing
and try tweaking them a bit, because they are guy who made the presets has probably
got a different set of speakers and a different guitar and different hands,
definitely got different hands to you, so therefore it's gonna sound a little bit
different so, it's really important that you try and check it out on your own as
well, now if you've got any questions about this stuff as usual leave me a
comment over on the website and I answer them as often as I possibly can. If you're
over on youtube please, hit that subscribe button, like and hit the bell icon if you
want to be notified when anything live I really hope you enjoyed this lesson and
I will see you for plenty more very soon and take care of yourselves bye bye.