A Brief History of Electric Guitar Distortion

I want to thank Squarespace for helping make this video possible head on over to Squarespace column slash Polyphonic to get 10% off your first purchase there are a few sounds in all of music more iconic than a distorted guitar from Chuck Berry's opening lick on Johnny be good through Jimmy Page's electric black dog or angus young's thunderous back in black all the way to Jack White's crunchy fell in love with the girl distortion is synonymous with rock and roll in fact when many people think of the electric guitar the sound that comes into their head is Distortion rather than the instrument clean it's really not a stretch to say that distortion helped to make music what it is today but what exactly is distortion and where did it come from let's take a closer look distortion can really describe a number of different processes but all of them are achieving the same outcome manipulating an instruments waveform to change the sound any kind of amplification device has a limit to the length of sound waves it can put out when you start to push past that limit the device will compress the edges of the sound waves which messes with the sound and a lot of recording distortion is actually something to be avoided for example if I crank up my voice over like this it distorts and makes me rather unpleasant to listen to however it turns out that exact process sounds pretty cool when you do it to a guitar guitarist first started to figure this out in the 1940s back then they used vacuum tube amplifiers these vacuum tubes could only take so much electricity going through them guitarist discovered that if you cranked the volume on your amp the power flowing through it would push it into overdrive and the vacuum tubes would compress the sound wave so that they won't break the result was shifting a smooth clean guitar sound into something with more grit and growl this kind of distortion is aptly named overdrive and it quickly became the rage in the late 1940s and early 1950s we don't really know who the first to do it is but we do know that one of the early pioneers of this distortion was named junior Bernard Bernard was the lead guitarist for Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys he was an aggressive player who was trying to push a sound into something grittier and earthier to reflect the country blues he played for a perfect example of this Distortion check out Bernard blues guitarists all over heard Bernards sound and latched on experimenting with distortion on their own one of these was Gauri Carter who filled his track Rock awhile with intense funds [Music] another artist that dabbled in distortion was Howlin wolf for example just check out the fuzzy lick on 1951 s how many more years [Music] earlier in 1951 jackie brenston and his delta cats had released rocket 88 a song that some qualify as the first rock-and-roll recording that song featured willie Khazar ripping a wicked distorted guitar riff though legend has it his distortion came by accident there's conflicting stories as to how but everyone seems to agree on the basic facts kiss arts amp got damaged while the band was on the road to try to fix it he stuffed balls of newspaper into it hoping to hold the speaker cone in and the result was unintentional Distortion but producer sam phillips loved the sound and so he leaned into it [Music] this started a trend that would continue through the 1950s guitarists sabotaging their amplifiers to create their own Distortion one of these was Link Wray who stabbed his amp speaker cone with a pencil to give it a heavy gritty sound you can hear that in a track like Rumble which was so intense for the time that it got banned from airplay because people thought it would incite gang fights [Music] [Applause] this was a bad time to be a speaker cone in 1964 Dave Davies took a razor and ambushed his cone to create the guitar sound of you really got me [Music] by this time musicians had realized what distortion was capable of and people started to look for new ways to do it without destroying their amps that's where the fuzz box comes in in 1961 Marty Robbins bassist Grady Martin played through a mixing board with a faulty connection the result was a sludgy heavy bass solo that cut through a warm country song [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] recording engineer Glenn T snotty took this sound and reverse engineered it by figuring out where the circuit was faulty he was able to create a small box that could recreate the sound the fuzz box in addition to letting musicians play the sound without annihilating their equipment it also allowed guitarists to turn distortion on and off with the stomp of a foot in its early days fuzz box sales were lukewarm but then a guitarist by the name of Keith Richards decided to try one out and tore out one of the greatest riffs of all time satisfaction [Music] this rift single-handedly vaulted the fuzz box into common usage and soon enough imitators were coming in creating their own take on the equipment one of the first to do so was Ivar arbiter who created the arbiter fuzz-face a young man named Jimi Hendrix picked up one of these and used it on his band's debut album when are you experienced opened with the manic psychedelic distortion of Purple Haze there was no turning back [Music] thanks to his guitar tech Roger mayor Hendrix would continue to innovate with Distortion playing around with new combinations of amps and fuzz boxes to push distortion like none before him and following Hendrix we would see countless innovators in distortion throughout the 70s and 80s it was a race to see who could push music into the grittiest loudest territory and distortion became essential to the growing genres of hard rock metal and punk today it's not uncommon to see guitarists like John Frusciante or the edge layer all kinds of different post-processing and distortion to create that perfect sound distortion is the lifeblood of rock and roll it helped birth the genre and then it allowed it to explode in popularity and change music forever and it all happened because of a few lucky accidents this video is brought to you by Squarespace head on over to squarespace.com slash polyphonic to start your free trial and use the offer code polyphonic to get 10% off your first purchase if you want to make a website for your band blog business or really anything else in your life Squarespace is the place for you it's an all-in-one platform where you can use designer templates to build your own website they've got award-winning 24/7 customer service and a really user-friendly interface I'm a big fan of Squarespace and I just used their platform to build a new website where I'll be hosting all kinds of playlists it's gonna be a great resource for viewers who wonder what song I played or want to get more into the topics that I touch on I don't have a ton of background in web design and honestly it was really seamless and easy to make it slick looking web site it was all drag-and-drop and it was really intuitive to integrate the playlists right into the web site so head on over to squarespace.com slash polyphonic to start your free trial today and remember use the offer code polyphonic to show them that I sent you and you'll get 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain [Music]

Channel: Polyphonic

Views: 1,304,376

Rating: 4.9226117 out of 5

Keywords: polyphonic, music, video essay, distortion, guitar, electric guitar, distorted guitar, overdrive, fuzzbox, jimi hendrix, link wray, goree carter, junior barnard, rock, rock n' roll, history, music history, howlin wolf, rock and roll, rocket 88, jackie brenston

Id: iYU90XajYmU

Length: 9min 16sec (556 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 20 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Tom_Stall]

@1:02 You are not pushing the limit of the wavelength, you are pushing the amplitude which would be shown as height on the usual time domain display. If you changed the length of the wave you would be changing the frequency/pitch of the guitar.

[u/bstix]

Distortion really works great with guitars, because you can play the guitar very expressively, but distortion isn't just for guitars. I'd even say that the guitar lends itself a little too well to distortion because it all sounds decent with distortion.

Using it on another versatile instrument like a keyboard with different velocity and filter wheel etc. can really bring out a lot of nice results and also a lot of not so nice sounds. That has helped me get a whole different understanding of musical intervals. Try it out. Play a third or a fifth, octaves, minor, major, whatever using a keyboard with distortion and you'll see how some stuff works very differently than you're used to. Common pleasant intervals are no go while other hollow intervals are suddenly preferable, maybe.

You know the classic blues riff where you play two strings and bend one up so they play the same note? That works great with distortion. Try that on a keyboard, and why stop there? A synth can bend any note anywhere. A bending guitar can scream like a sick animal alright, but it can't scream like an army of malfunctioning machines.

[u/induna_crewneck]

Polyphonic has become one of my favorite YouTube channels. He's for music what Lessons from the screenplay is for music.

[u/fauxRealzy]

Holy shit that Link Wray tune is fucking killer

[u/YetisInAtlanta]

Just watched this last night! Great video, really makes you appreciate the innovation of these past legends. Hell that thing about the kinks guitar playing cutting the amp with a knife to get the sound on you really got me was nuts

[u/Kindainappropriate_]

I truly don't like this guy's videos, they are so generic and poorly researched. At least he seems to have abbandoned the music analisys thing, that was really embarassing stuff. The Tool one was dwarfed brutally dwarfed by the one made by Rick Beato. I think he gets so many views because the editing is above the average compared with other youtube's music teaching stuff, but that's not a good reason. I feel the massive downvote coming :D

[u/ifjake]

This was easier to put together than I thought. Apple Music playlist of the main examples -

https://itunes.apple.com/us/playlist/history-of-distortion/pl.u-Rl7T6kJa0

[u/Ryclea]

Episode II-The 80's: Enter the EMGs.

[u/cloudhopper666]

an interesting and informative video - thanks for posting