The Distorted Guitar
One of the earliest examples of a DIY movement in contemporary popular music is the story of how the concept of the distorted guitar became as commonplace as it is today.
The earliest guitar amps, made in the 1930’s, were small things with circuitry easy to overdrive. This, obviously, was not desirable for musicians at the time. When the product itself appeared weak and faulty, built by imperfect hands, it did not invite the desire to attempt to overcome its limitations and desired usage. This caused musicians to want to stay inside the limits of the product rather than exceed them.
In response, the manufacturers decided to follow the desires of the public and make amps that were larger, could output louder volumes and allowed for clean tones at these volumes.
Here, in the late 40’s, the desire to work against the tool appeared.
The American Western Swing guitarist Junior Barnard designed his own pickups in the 40s. These would pick up sound at greater amplitude, causing the nice, big amplifiers to finally overdrive again. The first known recording of this sort of technique was Goree Carter’s ”Rock Awhile”.11
However, just overdriving was not quite enough. As musicians desired grittier tones, the misuse of equipment started turning into abuse. There are many rumors concerning how certain guitarists achieved their signature sound. Some methods seemed to be repeatedly pricking the speaker membrane with needles or pencils, cutting it with knives, dislodging the tubes within the amp or, either willingly or accidentally, dropping the entire amp unit on the floor.
Examples of this include ”Rocket 88” by Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats, ”Rumble” by Link Wray and ”You Really Got Me” by The Kinks. Notice the difference in guitar tone between these different tracks, and consider that none of these tones were achieved using effect pedals but rather physical altercation of the amplifier itself
Eventually, manufacturers caught up and decided to relieve musicians of the need to permanently wreck their equipment. In 1962 Gibson Guitars released the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz pedal, an effect pedal inspired by the 1961 country track ”Don’t Worry” by Marty Robbins, where a faulty mixing board connection caused the guitar solo to become distorted. The effect had been extracted from the circuitry of the amp itself and could now be practiced safely.
While not an immediate commercial success, sounds like the fuzz-reverb combination of Jimi Hendrix continued to proliferate the concept and fuzz/distortion/overdrive pedals gradually became commonplace, eventually being adopted by the heavy metal genre. It seems to me quite logical that the extreme commercialization that heavy metal would go through would happen alongside the removal of its signature sound from its DIY roots into the now firmly established aesthetics of what a distorted guitar sound is. This wouldn’t be seriously challenged until the noise rock movement of the mid 80’s leading into the shoegaze movement of the 90’s, where the use of extreme amounts of effect pedals created unique wall of sound textures. This I would also define as a misuse, as it was common for part of the sound to stem from the artefacting that was caused by the signal degrading in different ways as it was sent from pedal to pedal often several tens of times.12