Re: Overdrive/Distortion and "Feel"
Hiya
I've been playing for a long time, and i can look back from here and see many phases i went through along the way, and there were several 'happy accidents' i stumbled across as a youngster.
One was....(and i still do this to this day, and always will)....play and practice electric guitar totally UNPLUGGED. You can learn how your piece(s) of wood respond to a myriad of techniques and styles, and build a relationship with how you play that guitar and what you can extract from it. You can find ways to make is sound distorted, clean, thick, thin, harmonicailly alive, jazzy, rocky, etc. etc.....all before you plug into an amp. Then, when you do plug in, these things will come alive, in wonderful 3 dimensional ways.
Another thing i discovered ...when i started, there were no master volume controls. That's right !!...I'm a dinosaur and proud of it. To rock things up, i would build little single-transistor boosters and treble boosters (think Dallas Rangemaster style) and slam the front of the amp harder with a still-clean but boosted signal. I still had full dynamic range. I learnt that i would need several amps of varying power-levels so i could set them on a high volume to get into that 'tone zone' and cover all the applications, from bedroom to bar to large halls.
Over the years, the master volume sound has become it's own thing and of course guitar music has become .....errr.....well....MORE of everything, particularly distortion and heavily saturated sounds. And everything much faster. It does seem that with all that, dynamics and articulation are much harder to get through. It is also, IMO, much harder to delvelop an instantly recogniseable tone signiature with high distortion.
WahWah and Hot_Grits are so right in what they say. Strangely, the journey is often kinda backwards....we start off hearing the players of the day and want to play fast and make big statements, and as time goes by, we learn to hear ourselves and go back to slower, simpler and more articulate and really begin to hear ourselves and what we do that is good and what we can improve. As we address those things, speed comes simply because we are playing a lot to improve our styles.
The meanest sounding rock players i have ever heard are usually playing with surprisingly little distortion, the less they use, the more fully dynamic the sound is, all the better to project and really hit the audience hard. It takes a lot of skill and sheer balls to do that, and certainly separates the men from the boys, IMHO. It IS so much easier to sound awesome with a lot of drive and distortion, but again at this point i refer back to what WahWah has to say about this.
Just practice, without an amp and with clean amp sounds, and make honest appraisals about what you are achieving (recording yourself will help greatly with this). And keep working and working at it. It is a lifetime's work, just take baby steps, they all add together over time. As others have said, keep the equipment stuff in perspective, because it really is about the hands (and heart and balls, too, if i may say so).
cheers, neil.
