This is why the pioneers of guitar distortion were simply badass players who decided to turn up their amps really loudly. Imagine a blues player trying to cut through the noise of a loud bar or dance hall, cranking up the volume, and discovering a whole other thick, warm, dirty sound. But in the studio, recording engineers considered it an error and kept guitars clean and clear.
The song was so rough sounding that radio stations around the U. Pretty quickly, musicians started going to great lengths to create the best distortion tones, sometimes modifying or deliberately breaking parts of their amps in search of that perfect dirty sound. Until this point, sound engineers had spent decades trying to avoid distortion and produce perfectly clear, unaltered waves on record. Tubes make especially nice tones from overdriven signals because they keep rounded waves and crests, unlike solid state distortion, which cuts off the signal and flattens it.
But before we made leaps and bounds in the field of musical technology, instruments and amplification were decidedly rudimentary. If you wanted something more from your tone, you were going to have to get creative.
Read all the latest features, interviews and columns here. It comes with no surprise that the genre known for changing the course of music would also change the blueprint for its accompanying technologies. Mistakes were made, amps intentionally destroyed, and the results? They were revolutionary. In the s, a number of blues and Western guitarists decided what they needed from their sound was simply something more. Meanwhile, Leo Fender kept on designing bigger and more powerful amps. In , he came up with the idea of building the amplifier and speakers in separate cabinets in a configuration known as a piggyback amp.
Fender amps started to become popular with musicians in England during this time, but the prices were too expensive for most musicians to afford.
When drummer Jim Marshall opened a drum shop in , he realized that many guitarists needed an affordable amplifier that was loud enough to be heard over drums and that the small, low-powered combos made in the U. They also decided to configure the amp as a separate head and closed-back speaker cabinet featuring four inch Celestion speakers. The result of their efforts was the JTM45, and it was tested and approved in the early design stage by the lauded Lord of Loud, Ritchie Blackmore.
With the introduction of the JTM45 amp, the rock-solid foundation for heavy guitar tone was finally laid. This amp and 4x12 combination was suitably loud; it delivered deliciously aggressive, harmonically rich distortion tones; and its bass was big, tight and, well, heavy. In their insatiable quests for maximum volume, pro guitarists like Richie Blackmore, Pete Townshend and Big Jim Sullivan pushed Marshall to build even more powerful amps and bigger speaker cabinets.
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