Hello internet my name is Ayla Tesler-Mabe and today in this lesson we're going to be talking
about a guitar pedal effect family known as gain effects so let's talk about what that even means
and also i do want to preface this by saying that there is no requirement for guitar players to be
totally into their gear and know everything about their tone you do you you do whatever works for
you but i do think that there is a lot of power that comes from being able to control your tone
and you know getting exactly the kind of sound you want because it'll help you get closer to sounding
like your heroes it'll help you hone in on your own artistic sound and identity as a guitar player
and if you ever want to get into production this is all stuff that you'll need to know how to work
through so i think there are a lot of reasons to start exploring tone especially if you find
it fun so let's dive in what is gain because that's obviously going to be a very important
term to define in this lesson and i want to first separate volume from gain because a lot of people
sometimes get them confused i got them confused for a while but they're actually different things
so volume it's like when you turn you know the volume of your amp up and down or your guitar
it's just affecting you know the loudness of the signal whereas gain is affecting the volume
within a sound system so it actually might end up manipulating the tone and character
of sound that you're hearing oftentimes it can add some grit to your tone it can
add some saturation and that's where it is different from volume so if i roll off the volume
you'll notice that the signal is simply getting quieter but it's not necessarily changing in
its character of tone as in getting grittier or dirtier or less whereas when i throw on some sort
of overdrive effect you can hear that some sort of grit is added to the tone so let's highlight
some different type of gain effects that have been used by the iconic guitar players of the past and
present and hopefully this will help you figure out what the difference is between these different
types of pedals and which one might be appealing to you gain effect number one is the tc electronic
spark mini booster which is usually referred to as a clean boost or a transparent boost and
it's definitely the mildest of all of the effect pedals i'll show you today as the name might imply
the intention with this particular pedal is just to transparently boost the signal you
know the volume however even though they want it to be perfectly transparent it usually isn't and
sometimes this can be used to your own benefit as a player because if you have an amp that naturally
has a bit of grit on it if you throw a boost in front of it you're gonna drive that amp even more
and same thing with effect pedals we'll explore this more later but essentially it can bring out
grittiness in your amp or in other pedals and the reason it might not work so well in this
case is because i'm running through a twin reverb which is specifically designed to not break up
even as you turn it up to higher volumes but not all amps are like that so it can be a lot of fun
but you can hear there is a little bit of grit added
as well as volume it's subtle but brian may and rory gallagher are two examples of guitar players
who would use this in front of a much grittier amp or overdrive and they would actually be
able to bring out a lot of character and you know grittiness in their tone so this is a great pedal
for making things louder that's what i usually use it for but again it can also be used to drive
other pedals and amps and make them dirtier sounding so that's our first effect pedal let's
move on to the next one so now we're going to take a look at a very specific branch of the gain
effect pedal family known as overdrive essentially what overdrive is supposed to do is emulate the
sound of your amp being cranked enough so that it breaks up which again was kind of ostensibly the
intention of you know the boost that i was talking about before where you can use it to drive the amp
so that it breaks up the good thing with overdrive is it allows you to get that broken up sort of
tone without having to turn your amp up to a trillion because that can hurt your ears and your
neighbors might be upset and sometimes you don't want that but overdrive comes in many different
forms you know there are lots of overdrives out there that will add different sort of
characters to the tone like right now we're going to take a listen to the ibanez ts9 tube screamer
kind of made famous by stevie ray vaughan let's take a listen to what that sounds like
so we can hear some really nice grittiness added to the tone
so again without any overdrive this is what we hear with overdrive
very nice and of all of the overdrives that i'll be showing you this one definitely
has the most transparency to it as in it's less saturated and maybe
full sounding than the others you can still sort of hear the natural tone of the guitar
through it but of course there's a lot of awesome crunch that's also added on there
very nice especially if you like that stevie ray vaughan texas blues sound
it's perfect for that but now let's move on to the next overdrive
so up next we have the lawrence petras design 68 drive the newer models of this pedal sound even
better which is saying a lot because this already sounds fantastic as you'll hear in a moment
but this pedal was created to emulate the sound of a 1968 marshall super lead plexi 12000 series
this is obviously the perfect pedal for anyone who loves you know late 60s 70s rock tone
let's just compare it to the tube screamer so we can hear how differently that overdrive is colored
so this pedal emulates the organic warm liquid sounding overdrives from you know the 1968
era of music history again like i said it's perfect for anyone who
likes players from that era you know jimi hendrix the who all of those kinds of rock bands
used you know martial stacks with the 1968 era specifications but also more modern players like
eddie van halen used also you know 1968 plexi specifications to get his famous brown sound so
it's a really cool pedal again for anyone who likes that type of playing and that sounds
very nice okay let's move on to the next overdrive so the last overdrive pedal i'm
going to be showing you today is the lawrence petross design 87 drive again this is an older
model of the pedal but i think it perfectly shows you know just how overdrive progressed throughout
the decades and it is even more high gain and saturated than the previous overdrives because
music at that time was heading in a heavier direction so this pedal is perfect for anyone
who likes you know the rock of the 80s hair metal all that kind of stuff high gain rock
it's emulating the sound of a lot of marshall plexi stacks that people were
using in la recording studios at the time you know the jcm 800 all of those sorts of tones
let me play you a little bit of music with it and let me know what you think
uh so as you might have heard that petal has an even more searing high gain heavy modern sort of
tone but let's get even heavier ah segway move on to the next one I'm all about my segways yes
now we're going to move into another branch of the gain effect family known as distortion if the last
effects I was showing you were not quite heavy enough this might be for you especially if you
like styles of music such as metal punk really really heavy rock whatever it is as the name
suggests here this pedal the metal zone it's used to emulate kind of a typical metal sound
and it's one of the most polarizing pedals out there but if dialed in right i actually think can
sound quite nice um and it's also supposed to be used not directly into an amp but used as a preamp
sort of thing and that's where it sounds the best but that's not what i'm going to do in this case
i'm just going to plug it directly into the amp see what happens but let's take a listen to it
so as you heard that is definitely a heavier sounding pedal than the overdrives i showed
you previously not all distortion sounds exactly like this but i think that gives
a pretty good idea of what separates distortion from overdrive so the last type of gain effect
we're going to be looking at in this video is fuzz so this effect came quite literally from
guitar players in the 50s and 60s using damaged equipment by accident or on purpose it's typically
a lot more unruly and jagged sounding than other types of gain effects and it
works by heavily saturating and clipping your signal it's just a really cool sounding effect
oh
so hendrix is a guitar player who's closely associated with this type of tone
but it's also perfect for heavier players who like more modern bands like the smashing pumpkins i
know billy corgan huge fuzz fan as well and what's interesting about this pedal the mxr brown acid
fuzz is of course the name itself and you know the design of it is a reference to woodstock which
happened in 1969 but apparently this pedal is based off of 1970s uk fuzz circuitry i personally
think it works really well for either and if any of those styles are appealing to you maybe
this is the perfect pedal for you and it's worth checking out so the last thing i want to touch
on before we move on because i did mention that i would talk about this that gain effect let's move
all the way back to the first pedal i showed you when you put it in front of another effect
it will further drive the natural sound of that effect pedal so again let's listen to our fuzz
definitely really saturated already but let's turn that boost on and see what happens
of course it did make it louder but i could hear that it was even fuzzier sounding to use
an adjective that might describe it well again that's a really cool way to start
looking into how these petals can shape your tone so in conclusion we talked about
different members of the gain family today of course starting with gain which helps drive and
break up the sound of your amp or other pedals that you're using it's the perfect pedal for
anyone who really wants to preserve the sound of their guitar and their amp naturally and they just
want to increase the volume but maybe add a little bit of grit to it then we talked about overdrive
which in the same vein as gain is great if you like the natural sound and tone of your guitar
you know kind of like a tube amp sort of tone and you want to preserve that but you want to
add a little more grit and color to it we talked about distortion which is great if you want an
even heavier saturated often times hi-fi sort of tone and then we talked about fuzz which is great
if you again want a heavier sort of tone but one that's probably even more unruly than all of the
other effects we talked about and has even more of a perceivable kind of grain and jaggedness to
it and if you start to understand these effects where they come from who they've been used by
i think you start to understand so much more about music history and as a guitar player i think it's
amazing to really get a handle on your tone and what you think sounds good what you think sounds
bad this will all help you on your journey to finding your own artistic voice on the instrument
which i think is the ultimate goal for any musician thanks for watching this video i hope you
learned a little something about gain effects and maybe about yourself as well and what you like i'd
love it if you left a comment down below of what your favorite gain effect was that i mentioned
in this video or any that you wish that i had mentioned and i hope that you have a wonderful day
take
so you