The Effect of Guitar Overdrive Distortion on Your Playing
It is important to talk about the effect guitar overdrive has on your playing while practicing or performing. Overdrive distortion does more than just change your sound, or rather, the fact that it changes your sound leads to a lot of other effects. One of the most significant points is that when you have guitar overdrive engaged, it can change what chords and melodies you play.
When it comes to chords, guitar distortion will make some of the more tense chords you play with a clean tone sound very dissonant and dense. Any tension between intervals in the chords will be highlighted, so this may affect what you play. You may want to steer clear of this kind of sound, or you may want to use overdrive distortion to create this type of attention-grabbing sound.
When you are playing melodies, you might play some different intervals than you used to if you have distortion or overdrive engaged. You might go for some wider intervals and play in a more angular style, which the overdrive tends to bring out. Overall, you will probably play a more intense and hard hitting line with distortion on, it just tends to be associated with that kind of sound.
The amount of overdrive distortion you have going will affect what you play as well. With just a little bit of distortion, you can create a nice blues or jazz sound that you may use to give your playing a little extra sound complexity. You can still play some delicate things with a slight bit of overdrive on them and the distortion will enhance the sound rather than overpower it.
Guitar overdrive and distortion can be used both to change your sound, and change up the style you play in. This can be a helpful exercise for people who feel they are getting tired of playing the same things or someone who wants to tap into higher intensity playing. In much the way playing in an alternate tuning can change everything you do, using overdrive can work in the same way.
December 08 2009 12:17 pm | Guitar Equipment