Enough distortions? Time to give it a rest?

[Mark Hammer]

Don't get me wrong.  I like overdrive.  I like distortion.  I like fuzz.  I like it glitchy.  I like it searing.  I like it smooth.  I like it scooped.  I like it throaty.  I have dozens of the stupid things.  But dammit, don't you think that after some 10-20 thousand variations and products, it's enough already?  Do we NEED yet another one?  I understand the desire of young folks to think of themselves as "pedal-makers", and to a much lesser extent, I understand the motivation of Asian manufacturers to be able to turn out a product for a dollar less in production costs than their nearest competitor and take over the market in online sales.  I understand the motivation of someone here who says "I have such-and-such parts sitting around doing nothing.  Can I apply them to something useful...like a fuzz?"  I also understand the motivation of a company/maker that says "This classic circuit is and sounds great, but here's a little trick it has always been capable of yet never tapped, so we'll add it and call it something different."  However, so many of the products out there, and many of the circuits displayed here as well, don't really result in anything different than what a 1000 or more other circuits do.  They may do it slightly differently, but in the end it's not something you couldn't do by sticking a booster or EQ in front of or after an existing circuit, or simply setting the amp controls a little differently.  There is an enormous degree of redundancy out there, even though the typical Youtube demo strives to disguise it.

Driving with the radio on the other day and switching from one channel to another, it was difficult to find anything that did not use some form of harmonic distortion on the guitar.  There were simply no clean guitars to be found anywhere.  That may be a product of my region. but I think not.  What gets called "country" is not immune to it either.  There are probably less than 1% of players who describe their preferences as "country" that DON'T have one or two overdrives on their pedalboard, and an amp with separate Gain and Master Volume for getting a basic grind level that can be ratcheted up.

Again, I'm not giving preference to clean tones.  I like it dirty, too.  I'm just wondering if maybe we've hit "peak distortion" and the saturation market has become saturated.

[jfrabat]

Well...  Yes and no.

Yes, what you are saying is true that there are already circuits out there that do every kind of OD/distortion/fuzz imaginable.  The thing is that most of us do not know more than half of them even exists.  And sometimes it is more fun to make it (from the hobbyist standpoint).  Keep in mind, for someone at my level, designing and trying things out (I am sure I hve not 1 design that does not already exist!) is a way of understanding how a circuit works/behaves.  Also, there is a sense of achievement of designing your own, even if it sounds EXACTLY like another circuit (or even if you reach the same conclusion as another circuit). 

Now, from a commercial perspective, I think you are right, and it is actually even worse, because in many cases, you have EXACTLY the SAME circuit with 20 different names for different companies (Tube Screamers, Big Muff Pi, etc.).  I also think a clean sounding guitar would be a nice "tone", as it is certainly NOT overused now a days!

[Steben]

Don't get me wrong............... ....................  I like it dirty, too..........

Ah Quarantine...

Some thoughts....

Of course you are right. It is saturated.
But aren't there enough cars already as well? Every 5 years a new model of the same brand comes out.

I guess distortion is easy. It is entry level electronics. DIY'ers always seems to go for drive first. It makes sense.
And modulation is like ... dominated by digital now.

Do not forget the complete pedal market started with the quest for that sustain tone. When fuzz really got the UK by 1965, it exploded. After that in 5 years, 5 marks of tone bender where introduced.... and every company wanted to sell a fuzz. Even Maestro jumped into the FZ-1B with three versions....
No fuzz then, no pedals as we know it.

But I don't agree on the lack of clean and certainly not lack of mild driven tone.
The problem you experience is the vast majority of mediocrity in society.
Perhaps you noticed, but lately I am into a quest which always leads to somehting like modding an amp to have LESS gain.
Peavey Bandits are revived for some years now because of some aussie youtube guy who advocated the clean channel.

And what about tunnel of love by Dire Straits? Yes yes. That song. Do you think it would sound the same if the sound was just as clean as sultans of swing? That nicely gentle drive you hear now and then is magic. It makes me adore stuff like Fuzz Faces even more: a circuit that can CLEAN UP. I mean, Hendrix used it exactly like that. It is a fuzz, but is versatile.

[kraal]

Hi,

1) I agree
2) You're lucky to hear guitar distortion, when turning on the radio (here you mostly hear electronic music)
3) IMHO most pedal buyers, prior to selecting their gear based on their taste, comparison of sound, base their selection on:
   a) Hype / Fame
   b) Color
   c) Cost
   which makes infamous, ugly, expensive (or cheap) effects kind of "undesirable"
4) for many people, the music to be played is the music they hear (sheep category) OR the music other don't like or don't know (rebel category, that do not realize that they are sheep as well), which makes alternative (classic) sounds less desirable (for the masses)
5) Most of the time, it's easier (requires less knowledge) to copy and tweak a distortion compared to work on (understand) a chorus, auto filter, compressor... which again leads to focus on simple things
6) All in all it's easier to copy rather than create, and as time passes, real innovation becomes more an more complex and requires more and more knowledge (or genius ideas) which explains why copies are overrepresented
7) Is the market saturated ? Well I'm pretty sure that if somebody sells a fuzz face clone paint in Vantablack, there will be thousands of people willing to acquire it... Not because it is needed, but because it would be a curiosity that will help them fight their own boredom.

Regards,

[kraal]

The problem you experience is the vast majority of mediocrity in society.

You summarized my whole post with this sentence 

[EBK]

I am reminded a bit of a conversation I had with a distiller who wanted to make gin.  He said that in order to produce the good gin that he really wanted to make, he also had to produce vodka, which he had very little passion for.  Vodka could be sold at a higher profit margin, appealed to a wider market, and he couldn't get anyone interested in distributing his gin unless it was part of a more complete product line.  Perhaps some distortion pedals are like that, produced out of necessity rather than passion.

[marcelomd]

It's the easiest circuit to do, and what people understand as THE guitar sound.

It can also be really really simple and really complex. And you can spend hoooours debating it's merits and flaws. Perfect for cork sniffing!

Anything beyond an overdrive requires more than a little electronics knowledge. Equalizers are boring. Delay/reverb is either digital or expensive. Modulation is hard to get right.

[bartimaeus]

shhhh don't give away the secrets! how else am i going to start a new company selling five different tubescreamer clones, each with one filter cap value changed but very different branding...

remember, the music that sounds best on the radio is the most compressed, and often a good way to get that it to add some grit to everything going through the mixing board. and distortion makes it easier for only a couple of notes to sound really full, so you can make a song with just power chords...

but there's a lot of clean guitar out there in all sorts of genres, popular and not. maybe you'll like some of these?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKM3iLzvVKE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BME88lS6aVY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZnk549zXV8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxZVxFGTQNU

[Digital Larry]

I don't want to denigrate people's desire to tinker and learn about electronics.  That much is fully supportable.  Search for THE TOAN of a classic recording, as though possession of that toan will somehow inspire you to make a similarly impactful recording, is probably futile.  I talk about this a lot on another forum and understand that it is heavily biased by what I want to accomplish with my free time.  That is mostly songwriting, and I don't generally obsess about specific toanz.  Clean?  OK.  Medium drive?  OK.  Ridiculous?  Not as often, but OK.

But if people want to build things and try to understand WHY certain circuits sound a certain way, and what could possibly be done to tip it one way or the other, is absolutely fine.  They're not causing me any harm.

[matmosphere]

I'm with you, I've made enough fuzzes, and overdrives, and I've got a Rat or two (which means I have all the good distortion  )

Yet for some reason I still end up building them here and there.


It might be a fun exercise to create a list of all the main circuits and some derivatives.

[EBK]

It might be a fun exercise to create a list of all the main circuits and some derivatives.

Effects Database is basically this (but the design/coding of the site annoys me greatly, especially on a mobile browser).
http://www.effectsdatabase.com/

[davent]

With all there is and all i have i still usually end up straight into the amp, maybe a bit of delay.
dave

[jubal81]

The market situation reminds me of what you see with craft beer. A trip to the beer isle is a lot more fun than it used to be because there are so many brewers and variations with fun can art.

Hmm, a dry-hopped pilsner brewed with spruce tips and a silly dog on the can? Let's give that a try.

I'm sure insiders who know how everything's cooked find it all tedious, but to the blissfully unaware beer drinking me, it's all in good fun. I could see getting into home brewing just to make some very specific thing I dreamed up, which is pretty much how I approach making dirt pedals. Amuse myself and see what I come up with.

[matmosphere]

With all there is and all i have i still usually end up straight into the amp, maybe a bit of delay.
dave

hahaha, yeah there is that. I tend to play a lot unplugged because I live in a small place and have three kids. Nobody wants to listen to dad shred (not that I can shred either).

Reverb and delay, and maybe a Timmy is about where I am generally.

[Ripthorn]

I love all flavors of dirt, there are a ton of wonderful ones out there, and I think there is room for more. Yes, there are tons of TS, BB, and Big Muff clones, but there are also some creative ones out there. For example, the thread on here talking about other ways of using the classic CD4049 chip, or the works of Bajaman on the other forum. I actually just sent off boards for a dirt preamp I did that is really just the entire dirt preamp from my old Marshall 5210 amp, which sounds lovely.

I think there are new ways to approach it, but it requires people who are willing to think outside the box, and there are a lot who are not interested in that, they just want to whack out a clone, give it their own name and artwork, and make some money. I, myself, prefer to try new things with my projects, though I'm totally not above building yet another dirt pedal just to try it out. However, guitarists are such a traditional bunch (even the ones who try "crazy" effects, while the synth guys laugh) and there are some effects that aren't successful simply due to that fact. Doesn't mean it's not worth a try!

[aron]

NO WAY! Mark, have you even talked to a lot of guitarists lately? There is NO END to their desire to get yet another overdrive pedal! I am astounded at how many pedals my friends have purchased. I AGREE that the market is so saturated, but when people argue over the differences in the same circuit (made my different people), what can you do?

You want clean? There are TONS of pop tunes with an acoustic guitar loop over and over. GIME ME MORE DISTORTION! hahaha

and BTW, I just put in a Super Distortion pickup into my guitar so you know I got the fever too!

[Mark Hammer]

You got the fever?  You do realize that the only cure is MORE COWBELL!   

Getting or wanting "another" overdrive pedal is no great sin.  The problem is that so often they only think they're getting a different one.  After you have 20 or so of the damn things, unless they are REALLY and truly different, you start to think "Wait a second, didn't I just hear that a moment ago?".

There will always be a need and desire for pedals or plug-ins that add harmonic content.  People desire that aspect of emotional expression in their instrument, whether it be pounding on Wurlitzer piano keys, or getting that raspy Junior Walker saxophone tone or Roland Kirk flute trill or distorted Shure Green Bullet harmonica tone.  The question for me is whether we collectively have enough variants of that for guitar that all bases are covered from now to the end of time, and nobody needs to come up with any new ones; just think of interesting ways to use the existing ones.

It is in the nature of human thinking that we tend to learn in context, such that what we know exists in many "silos" or bins that don't connect with each other.  As a consequence, we may not realize that A, B, and C are the very same thing, simply because we heard/learned about them in different contexts, or we may not realize that X and Y  contradict each other, again because we learned that information in different contexts and never thought to compare them against each other.  In the pedal universe, we tend to only think about pedals one at a time.  Certainly reviews in print or on Youtube only pitch them to us in isolation; never saying that A is pretty much the same as B, C, D, and E, with maybe a little more or less treble or gain than those, but exhibiting 85% overlap in achievable sounds.

The whole thing reminds me of the tongue-in-cheek advertising campaign that Post cereals ran several years back, in which they touted the "new" diamond-shaped Shreddies - the same thing, but rotated 1/4 turn.

[ElectricDruid]

I was stood in a socially distanced queue in the local supermarket the other day next to a display of shampoo, and discovered you could buy the stuff with basically any type of fruit (Kiwi! Coconut! Apples!) or herb (Mint! Teatree! Rosemary!) in it, including several that I have no idea what they are. It's just soap for your hair really...
Distortion pedals is a bit like that these days - basic soap, with any flavour you like, and some you've never even heard of. But they all just get your hair clean and your guitar dirty.

I love the diamond shreddies, that's genius.

[Scruffie]

Every time I think of a new fuzz or distortion design that seems like something entirely new and different than on the market I jump to the breadboard in excitement and crack on... at first I love it, but it needs an EQ section... then I feel I could get some clipping variation to cover more ground... perhaps playing with the envelope?... just a hair more high end... no that was too much... 3-5 days of tinkering later and I'm not sure what sounds good or awful any more and slowly accept that there's about 3 different fundamental variations of fuzz and dirt and they all sound the same with the right EQ. At least until the next month.

[Mark Hammer]

Yup.  And it's the next month that keeps Hammond Manufacturing in business.