Practicing Guitar With Overdrive or Distortion
Practicing guitar with overdrive and distortion effects engaged is something that just about every guitar player will do at some point, but when should you and when should you not? There are times where this can both help and hinder you in the practice room, and its important to realize the difference. It all depends on what the goals of your practice are, and what you are trying to get out of it.
To start off, let’s talk about some of the scenarios where you do not want to use guitar overdrive distortion. If you are working complex picking technique you are going to want as clean of a tone as possible. The reason for this is that when you are going through scale runs or something like that, you want to be able to hear any mistakes that you are making. Overdrive and distortion have a tendency to cover up small slips or errors in playing notes that you are going to want to hear.
If you cannot hear the mistakes that you are making, you will not have any way of correcting them. Some people approach practicing looking to make as little mistakes as possible, and so they turn on the overdrive or distortion so they sound better, but practice is where you want to make mistakes, and you don’t want to ever have to rely on a certain effect just to sound good.
This applies the same to when you are practicing chords. With distortion engaged, the more complex chords will come through as clear, and you want to make sure that you are getting each note ringing clearly. Overdrive distortion will just get in the way for these types of exercises. Even if you are practicing a solo that may use distortion, you should practice playing it with a clean tone to make sure that you are getting all the notes out well.
Now, when can overdrive and distortion help your practicing? There are times when you are going to want to improvise and just play your instrument a little but for the experimentation and fun of it. This is when you should work with effects to explore different ways of playing. When you play your instrument, you react to what you are playing, so if you are reacting to a distorted signal instead of a clean one, you are going to play with a different style, and you might discover some techniques that you would not have used. You may also discover some problems you have in your playing that would not have come out without the effect.
Overdrive and distortion effects should be used responsibly in practice because just as they can be great ways to increase the ability of the guitar to make music, they can also hurt your music making abilities. Just be sure to always treat them as effects and not instruments in themselves and you should be using them in the right way.
January 09 2010 11:58 pm | Guitar Practice