How an accident revolutionized guitar sound | Hacker News Reader

How an accident revolutionized guitar sound

blogs.tennessean.com

114 pointsshawndumas35 comments

> The distorted sound of rock ’n’ roll guitar aggression was born in Nashville, in 1960.

That's not the way I heard it. Snoddy might have introduced the Fuzz-Tone in the 60s, but the distorted guitar sound began with Link Wray poking holes in his amplifier's speaker on "Rumble", in 1958.

Not to minimize the Fuzz-Tone's impact, by any means. Just setting the record straight. ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumble_(instrumental)

Agreed, I've read that as well.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucTg6rZJCu4

Although all of the comments here have been valid and interesting, I'm gonna poke this reply thread with a Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YAqTrbuxCRI

James Cotton - Cotton Crop Blues, on Sun Records. Recorded 1954, with a guitar solo harder/heavier than most records up until the late 60s (with a few exceptions like Dick Dale). And it features distorted power chords. Pretty much the first really heavy track out there, I figure. It's my go-to point to show people the origins of heavy, distorted guitar music.

I also like to show them some Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys, as he had a lot of electrified instruments (electric guitar, electric mandolin, pedal steel) and was a big influence on Chuck Berry and Elvis. Plus I love Bob Wills.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origins_of_rock_and_roll does a pretty good job of covering the important records that led up to the explosion of rock music in the 60s. Not sure about how it is beyond that.

Pretty glad a musical topic came up here on HN, though. I'm more passionate about music history than I am about computer science (though there are no career prospects there, so CS it is).

OT, but that Cotton Crop Blues link is at 6575 views as of now. (19:25 6Aug2013 ) Very curious to see what an HN link does to it.

It's at 6605, after nine hours (according to the time indicator between your username and "| link | parent | flag"; you forgot to say in what timezone you're in).

One of them is mine, and I only went there because of your comment to be honest.

Edit: you said "19:25" and "nine hours ago" was 2013-08-07 09:03:45 UTC, so you're at EDT? (incidently, everytimezone.com is pretty cool)

haha, yeah. Edit the comment to tag the time, forget the the timezone... EDT ( views are 6785 as of 21:42 7Aug2013, fwiw )

that is wicked - and it's actually a good song too (the one in the article is a horrid crooner one, far too smooth.)

I love learning new pieces of music history, and I'd swear that track was made by a time traveler. I've taken a number of music history classes (I originally wanted to major in music education) in jazz history, classical history, world history, and American history, and have never heard that track. Really appreciate it.

You're welcome :) Glad to share it.

I'd love to take more classes in music history! I already took one (called "Roots of Rock & Roll", covered the mid-1800s minstrel show through the 1960s) that I absolutely adored, but unfortunately there aren't any other jazz, world or American music history courses offered (I wouldn't be that interested in classical history, I'm not quite ready for it yet, but we'll see where my growing musicianship leads me over the rest of my years).

If you have recommendations for good books that deal with music history, especially American musical history from the past 200 years or so, I'd be interested. I also would be interested in discussing this stuff in general; it seems like a lot of people, especially within the tech community, don't delve that deeply into the history and context of music (or really of art in general), so it's great to meet individuals that do.

A torn speaker was responsible for the rocking sound in Rocket 88, recorded in 1951.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_88

Yes, when the 60s came around, guitar distortion was already a pretty common sound. Just think Beatles, Kinks, Rolling Stones, and of course Chuck Berry before them. What the fuzz changed is that it was the first distortion pedal, a smart alternative to destroying your amp speakers.

Link to Rocket 88 (1951): http://grooveshark.com/s/Rocket+88/24PPYE?src=5

Rock a While (1949), featuring the trademark rockabilly riff: http://grooveshark.com/s/Rock+A+While/3pQhHy?src=5

Oh, oh, let's play the "find similar but older music" game!

I'll go next! You were on the right track with blues from Texas, but it goes way before 1949. Try to find the Chuck Berry riffs...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odwaE1hlwgc

T-Bone Walker - I Got A Break Baby (1942) (B-side of Mean Old World, Capitol 10033) (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_Old_World)

Here's an article about him that I grabbed off Wikipedia's sources: http://www.there1.com/browse_articles.php?action=view_record...

> "[This single was] the first important blues [recording] on the electric guitar"

Some other cool stuff in the article too, like how he worked with Blind Lemon Jefferson (Robert Johnson also worked with him) and with Charlie Christian, who brought the electric guitar to jazz.

I'll go again just because it's fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbWmAgp2R30 - Ernest Tubb - Walking The Floor Over You (1941) (Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_the_Floor_Over_You)

A country single that sold over a million copies, and it used that nice prominent electric guitar, beating Walker by a year.

Reading further on Wikipedia to try and find earlier recordings, I'm pointed to an artist I've been exploring only this past week: Milton Brown & His Musical Brownies, one of the "big 3" Western Swing artists (along with Spade Cooley and Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys).

Ugh, this stuff's hard to find on Youtube... Found something: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qnjE5aB-cWQ - Milton Brown & His Musical Brownies - Right Or Wrong (1936, date source: http://www.secondhandsongs.com/performance/200653)

Note the electrified pedal steel solo midway through. That's some innovative stuff, though I like Merle Haggard's version better (on his Bob Wills tribute album, "A Tribute To The Best Damn Fiddle Player In The World" from 1970. Wills' version is also pretty good, but not all that much better than Brown's. As you can see, I think Western Swing is great stuff (my last.fm is utterly full of it), and my secret theory is that there were only 3 big Western Swing bands because there were only 3 pedal steel players talented enough in the 30s and 40s to do the style justice. Before it came along, there wasn't all that much popular music that really used the electric guitar.

Anyway, I digressed pretty hard, but I think I've made my point somewhere in there...

I tried to play along... There was a blues dude in the mid '40s who originally played an acoustic but on his live shows he had to play electric to be heard over the band. He did a lot of the same material as T-Bone Walker. I cannot for the life of me find or remember his name.

Along with Robert Johnson (and Bix Biederbeck, a jazz trumpet player form the 20s/30s) this gentleman helped make the blue guitar single note repertoire what it is.

Wish I could remember his name... :)

Huh, I remember hearing a similar story but I too can't place the name. I bet he was a Chicago guy... maybe Muddy Waters?

Johnson and Beiderbecke are both good name from their respective periods (30s country blues and 20s jazz), but I'd argue that there were significantly more influential musicians on the development of the blues style throughout the 40s and 50s. More on that in a minute... Robert Johnson's an interesting guy.

Johnson's influence is a weird case: he was almost totally unknown until the early 1960s, when that classic compilation (King of the Delta Blues Singers, on Columbia, 1961) came out with many of his recordings. As a result, his influence really begins to widen in the 1960s, as many white blues-rock bands were starting to form and gain popularity (such as The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds (featuring Eric Clapton), and Mike Bloomfield + Bob Dylan). This blues-rock was the stuff that really made an impact on American society at large, and as a result, we tend to consider Robert Johnson to be one of the seminal blues artists. Odd how that turns out.

Anyway, back to seminal blues artists. Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3yd-c91ww8) were the two who I'd argue contributed most to the "classic" style. Johnson was exceptionally prolific and exceptionally good, and Blind Lemon mentored many young artists, including Robert Johnson and T-Bone Walker. On the white side of things, Eddie Lang (see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Loc8WiDvNaE) was arguably the first jazz guitarist (and had a heavy influence on many blues musicians), and Jimmie Rodgers (yay, awesome video footage! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIlURYJI-xs) was arguably the first guitar-playing "modern" country musician (he fused country and blues). He too had a wide influence on blues artists, going so far as to collaborate with Louis Armstrong (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BFbY9Vw8DM), and to be the reason why Howlin' Wolf started "howling."

Thanks for playing :)

This article covers a number of accidental "discoveries" of distortion:

http://www.ultimate-guitar.com/columns/the_history_of/accide...

Another article at Gibson.com talks more in detail about "fuzz milestones": http://www2.gibson.com/News-Lifestyle/Features/en-us/who-cal...

The distortion in "Don't Worry" was a faulty preamp on the console, probably tube-based since the first transistor-based mixing board was made in 1964. The distorted guitar in the Beatles' "Revolution" was also an overdriven mixing board, but theirs was solid state IIRC.

But if you like country-flavored fuzz, WFMU has you covered with a retrospective: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2007/11/country-fuzz-sp.html

This reminds me of the famous "Phil Collins sound", which basically is a gated reverb applied on the drums, and was discovered by accident during a studio session.

http://thecollectivereview.com/hugh-padgham/hugh-padghams-ga...

in Music Technology lessons (yes, that was a subject for a few years in the UK, I think it's defunct now) they loved giving us Phil Collins to analyse - he used all sorts of weird stuff noone else has ever bothered with (gated reverb, reverse reverb, short time delay on vocals, all in the same song, almost as a matter of course.)

The endless repetition is why I still sit still every time I hear the intro to "in the air tonight" trying to find the beat before the vocals come in!

Reverse reverb was also used by Jimmy Page on several Led Zeppelin tracks (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_echo)

Ah, I remember doing Music Technology A-Level - it was a brilliant course, and it helped that our school had the funds to build a halfway decent digital recording studio.

I was lucky enough to attend Hurtwood House - I really wanted to do proper Music A-Level, but they didn't offer it, only music tech.

In retrospect, I enjoyed it far more than I would have pure music, because I was right in the middle of my guitars-are-awesome phase - a studio was just an elaborate set of effects pedals to me.

Hurtwood, anyway, had a ridiculously awesome setup - they spend much of the (substantial) school fees on Media, Theatre and music tech kit, so full digital edit suites, a huge theatre with proper cabling and sound systems, underground recording studios with proper soundproofing and huge mixers for A level projects (In my day, a 24-channel soundcraft monster, plus numerous physical compressors, EQs etc - I remember a particularly expensive white valve-driven vocal preamp! Now I believe their kit is just a digital desk + Logic Pro.)

When I left for Cambridge, I didn't make it onto their "wall of fame" - because Cambridge isn't an Equity-approved drama school. Seriously.

I think that its a case where a lot of people had the same idea at around the same time. As recording technology advanced in the 1950s, people realized there was some creativity to be found there.

Many people attribute backwards recording to the Beatles and George Martin, but it had been done nearly a decade earlier (on purpose even) by André Popp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andr%C3%A9_Popp with delirium in Hi-fi. Im sure this is not even the first instance.

Certainly there is significance here with the invention of the fuzz tone, and it definitely inspired a new wave of guitar effects, and most likely effects pedals. I think it demonstrates how the electric guitar is one of the most versatile instruments ever made and has a wider sonic palette than most any other thing out there when you account for playing styles, effects, and expression. Either way this was a great read, and I love to nerd out to audio, production and recording.

> Snoddy explains what happened by invoking tech-talk about tube amplifiers and insufficient wiring. But whatever happened inside that console...

He came at me with the mumbo jumbo!

Here's the song, for anybody curious: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCbIAmy6X0M

better quality: http://grooveshark.com/s/Don+t+Worry/450UFD?src=5

The "discovery" of distortion is an example of the idea that inventors are sometimes the first person to tell someone else about something, instead of the first person to discover the thing.

The electric guitar was invented in 1931. It then follows that guitars were being electrically amplified in 1931. Are we really to believe that it took 20-30 years for someone to turn up the gain higher than what would allow it to accurately amplify the input signal?

Tube amps distort in a very gradual way when overdriven. The "fuzz" sound is a more severe form of clipping. This is why transistor-based stomp boxes were sought out; it's actually hard to get a tube amp to clip in this exact way.

It would really be borderline impossible to try to pinpoint the origins of the distorted electric guitar sound.

Well before 1960, most amplifiers would begin to distort at higher gain levels. And even if you only want to count "deliberate" distortion, there's the famous example of Link Wray poking holes in his amp's speakers in '58.

This is an interesting story, but it's kind of overstating the significance. Or maybe just oversimplifying the history.

All amplifiers will go non-linear at high gain, so certainly the technical effect can be pushed well back into the 20's. I'm sure someone, most likely an engineer in broadcast radio, "heard" distorted audio long before this.

I think it's reasonable and interesting to ask how it became art, though.

Not the first distortion but the first 'fuzz'. Distortion is created by amp saturation at high levels while fuzz is created trough transistors which produce nearly square waves (http://www.geofex.com/effxfaq/distn101.htm fig.4)

Not the first distortion, but the first distortion using transistors. Didn't revolutionize guitar sound, but did give guitarists something to step on rather than a switch to flip.

What I took away from the article was that the patent didn't really help the "inventor." That sales didn't really start to take off until very near the end of his royalty period. But yet he was still very successful in the business with a long career.

Maybe it is just confirmation bias, but it sounded a bit like his invention of the fuzzbox did more for his reputation in the industry than it did for his bank account.

If that 'hack' story interests you, try this one about the amp found in a skip (dumpster) by Queen bass guitarist and electronics engineer John Deacon:

http://www.brianmay.com/brian/briannews/briannewsjun05.html

http://www.deacyamp.com/index.php?route=information/informat...

Link2 is to the slideshow of a booklet

Another accidental discovery of distorted guitar sound was made by Dave Davies of the Kinks in 1964, who says he sliced is amp with a razor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Davies#Early_years_.281963...)

The Kinks - You Really Got Me : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXWKowSK3yY

Don't Worry's distortion is breathtaking in the context it's presented. I can see how it would make an impact in the industry. It's quite a unique sound, consistent square wave distortion, verging on not sounding like a guitar any longer. Can't say I've heard anything like it in earlier electric guitar recordings.

I always like the story that when the Beatles went to the BBC to record a show the sound engineer (white lab coat and pipe) Flatly refused to allow them to use a feedback sound as this is the BBC we don't have feedback here!

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