The cultural evolution of distortion in music
royalsocietypublishing.org
royalsocietypublishing.org
That is only true when the string is plucked exactly at the middle - not a regular occurrence. Usually it's more of a sawtooth wave, just without the upper harmonics.
My experience with distortion in guitars is that a huge component here is how different it can sound depending on articulation. Some pieces for example require the player to not alternate their picking, but pluck only in one direction, as the difference is audible.
This is not always the case of course as some amplifiers like those made by Mesa Boogie get their signature tone by exploiting the limited gain-bandwidth product(GBP) of amplifiers, creating an even sound that at the high end of the gain setting is largely without dynamics.
In some cases(like the BOSS DS-1) the manufacturer killed the sound by introducing a technically better amplifier chip - the original had somewhat poor GBP and poor settling time, which in combination produced a nice lowpass filter with a resonance peak at the cutoff frequency, which in turn emphasized articulation.
It's all a surprisingly huge topic.
Designing dirt pedals for guitar is a very humbling exercise in that many seemingly innocuous decisions can have large impacts on the end result. Often times you're bucking what would normally be EE best-practices and exploiting the edges of behavior in components to coax out pleasing nonlinearities. Equal parts engineering and what can feel like sorcery (but usually has a reasonable explanation).
I'll never forget a friend showing me a Japanese made DS-1 from 1983, which had all those pleasant artifacts stemming from the circuits non-ideal performance. Newer ones sound really harsh in comparison.
The DS-1 is itself surprisingly complex. I'm particularly a fan of the little hidden RC circuit in the clipping stage(here spanning from R14 to C10):
https://www.electrosmash.com/boss-ds1-analysis#layout
As said in section 6.3, its effect is only significant below the diodes' forward voltage. I exchanged one diode in my unit with a yellow LED (a diode is a diode, all in all) and it was particularly audible. Initially I thought it's the LEDs junction capacitance, but that measures in tens of picofarads - not nearly enough to register.
One of my favorites in this genre are using CMOS inverters as inverting op amps with a very pleasing and smooth distortion sound.
For a sawtooth with all the harmonic, we have to use a bow. A bow directly stimulates a strong sawtooth movement simply because the string adheres to it and releases, many times a second. This will tune itself to a resonant frequency, along with the first bunch of its harmonics.
As Segovia said, the guitar is like a miniature orchestra https://youtu.be/DJrEl4Nsmsg?si=voLmARBDxGe8iDRo
> In simple terms, timbre is what makes a particular musical instrument or human voice have a different sound from another, even when they play or sing the same note.
> The physical characteristics of sound that determine the perception of timbre include frequency spectrum and envelope.
I still remember the moment in my bedroom 30 years ago trying to play Master of Puppets when I accidentally discovered down-picking.
Nobody hates ugly sounding distortion more than he or she who practices 5 hours a day with it.
Single note distortion, at its best, is a harmonically rich sound which shares something with bowed instruments and reed woodwinds.
Nasty sounding single distortion has not gained complete mainstream acceptance. Musicians who do that on purpose will remain niche, even today. From time to time, such nasty sounds make appearances in mainstream pop, but only as a kind of "cameo". The statement is, "we are inserting this ugly thing here specifically for its idiosyncratic effect, haha! But only a few seconds, we promise".
Distortion (other than perhaps mild distortion) has never been fully accepted in roles where the multiple voices of a complex harmony part would be distorted together.
Nowhere was that better seen than in jazz/rock fusion, which accepted ragingly distorted guitars for solo work, but not so much for the rest of the music: except, of course, in passages where the guitars provide the "sound of rock": distorted fourths and fifths and whatnot, or double stop bluesy cliches and whatnot.
The music best known for distortion and that couldn't exist without distortion (and a lot of it) is of course heavy metal, which is a big landscape of styles and sounds.
In metal, the harmonies from an individual guitar part tend to consist of only a few notes. The clean chord is transformed into something else, which perhaps cannot be described in music notation. Complexity comes from the distortion. Distortion includes the sum and difference products, which relate to the tonality and scale of the music in unsual ways. Those notes are not identified. If notation is used at all, the underlying clean notes are notated: e.g. C-F# tritone on the A and D strings, over open E bass. Heavy metal uses syncopated and alternating rhythms to separate bass notes from upper notes in three and four note chords. This is not only to create rhythmical excitement, but to better separate the notes.
The notes of a distorted chord are also easier to for the ear to identify if they are introduced separately as a lasciare suonare arpeggio; that's a thing in metal.
Harmonic textures are also created by combining distorted guitar parts. Using two lead guitars originated in rock, with groups like Wishbone Ash. Multitrack recording allows an unlimited number of parts to be layered.
I feel that Sunn O))) - named after the amplifiers, are a great example of slow rhythm music that relies upon heavy distortion and feedback to create the atmosphere and primary sound of their music. This is just a modern band, but the experimentation and techniques go back to psychedelic and acid rock from the 1960's, and mostly center around Black Sabbath as "the" band that really created the prototype for the sound.
Monolord, Bongzilla, Acid King, Bongripper, REZN, and SLEEP are some great modern examples that fit what you've described.
I'll fight this by agreeing with you. Saturation (a form of mild distortion) on the master is what I like to refer to as "the shit" because a nearly imperceptible amount really makes a track cohere. It takes a super light touch though, but I'd bet (without evidence) it's used on most tracks today.
> I'd bet (without evidence) it's used on most tracks today.
The Aphex Aural Exciter supposedly adds harmonics related to the signal by generating distortion in a certain way. That's been around since the 70s.
If you ever want to hear a guitar sound as rich as a synth, listen to someone running full polyphonic outputs for each string into a distortion per string. You get the rich harmonic violin/synth like tones of every string but can play full chords without any of the intermodulation products!
I'm kind of surprised guitars have stayed monophonic for as long as they have, and I feel like the next advance might be a cultural shift of guitars to a true polyphonic output path. Would definitely open up some interesting DSP pedal opportunities as a bonus.
The future is distorted guitars that can play complex chords imo
Guitars are now instruments mainly for backwards looking musicians. New players who want to use distortion want to reproduce the sounds of yesteryear, whether it be 70's hard rock or 90's metal.
It will not sound right without those intermodulation products. Even a simple double-stop blues bend with the G and B strings won't be right with separately distorted strings; you need to hear that beating warble arising from the difference of the frequencies, and how that beat frequency changes with the amount of bend. Intermodulation distortion in chords adds "grit", and that's an inseparable part of the attitude of the music.
Separately from that, guitarists can easily get their polyphonic jolies from playing cleanly.
There is also the whole world of guitars as MIDI controllers for synthesizers. The technology there is mature by now. You can get any sound you want, cleanly polyphonic.
In guitar, there this this bizarre movement of longing for vintage stuff and looking for authenticity in connection with the past. It's getting surreal and almost eerie when 20-somethings are making videos about guitars from 1950-something and pedals from 1979 and whatever. Kids are excited about stuff I thought was old and uncool in 1987. (Telecaster, WTF? Do I look like f'ing Bruce Springsteen?)
Probably the greatest development in guitar in recent years or decades is digital modeling. But what does that do? It is mainly backwards-looking. You have "amp models" which reference specific units or their archetypes. There is a lot of fuss about whether the tube sound is reproduced.
I am a huge thrash/death/black metal fan and a huge Ligeti/Reich/Ives/Ravel/Debussy fan so I could never call metal harmonically rich.
What to me makes metal is the percussive and melodic aspect combined of distorted, often palm muted for extra percussive effect, guitar strings in 5ths. Harmonically though, it is hard to get more simple.
I shared this theory with my then-little-in-both-senses sister, who asked "what, exactly, is distortion, in a musical sense?"
I trotted to my bedroom and retrieved Pink Floyd's Pulse. I popped disc 1 into the living-room CD player, cued up track 9 (Sorrow), and turned it up. We potched out onto the floor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO9Kp_Wn_2A
"Oh. Okay. Yeah, alright. I think I get it."
> This musical evolution is paralleled by the multipication of machines, which collaborate with man on every front. Not only in the roaring atmosphere of major cities, but in the country too, which until yesterday was totally silent, the machine today has created such a variety and rivalry of noises that pure sound, in its exiguity and monotony, no longer arouses any feeling.
> For many years Beethoven and Wagner shook our nerves and hearts. Now we are satiated and we find far more enjoyment in the combination of the noises of trams, backfiring motors, carriages and bawling crowds than in rehearsing, for example, the “Eroica” or the “Pastoral”.
Based on this idea it should be no surprise that, for example, heavy metal riffs were invented by a factory worker[2] or that the first techno music scene started in Detroit[3].
[1] Luigi Russolo. The Art of Noises: https://www.ubu.com/papers/russolo.html
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Iommi#Factory_accident
I'm betting a computer in this digital age, hence the rise of electronic music.
Maybe we are talking about the same causal variable though.
The engine and power chords as a form of sublimation.
Nostalgia is cheap of course, but some times cheap things make us happy and that’s fine.
His door genre deserves recognition too.
lol.
In contrast, I thoroughly enjoyed and resonated with this short conversation between Henry Rollins (Black Flag) and Don Was (President of the Jazz label Blue Note) about distortion in music: