dots and dashes by jenny downing via FlickrMost guitarists know what I’m talking about. So do some bassists. And maybe even some vocalists, and some harmonica players too. But if you don’t know, Distortion is Awesome.

But what is it? Why is it so friggin’ rad? And most importantly, how do you get it?

Let’s start Bill-Nye-Style, with some science.

What’s A Sound Wave?

First of all, we need a basic understanding of what a sound wave is. We’ll get more in depth with a full explanation of sound in another article, but for now, let the following suffice…

As you may or may not know, “sound” is basically “vibration”… or more specifically, an oscillation of pressure passing through a medium (like air) to reach our ear drums, which our brains interpret as sound. When you clap your hands, hit a drum, pluck a string, or tickle a puppy, the item generating the vibration is pushing air in waves going out in all directions. Just imagine dropping a pebble in a still pool of water. Just as waves ripple outward, so does sound through the air.

We can draw a representation of what this wave looks like on a graph, and it might look something like this:

In this little drawing, the horizontal axis represents time, and the vertical axis shows amplitude. We have here 5 different sound waves, each represented in a different color. Basically, as your eyes glance at this image from left to right, imagine the sound waves occurring through that time… the pressure in the air going up, then going down, then up again… this wave of pressure is the sound wave.

The more waves happen in the same amount of time, the higher the pitch of the sound. So in this diagram, the purple sound wave “sounds the highest”.

The above waves are “undistorted”. These are clear and perfect little sine waves. Lovely.

So how do we distort the crap out of them?

Distorting A Sound Wave

Well, one admission before we continue… the word “distortion” literally refers to any deformation of a sound wave… and so incidentally there are a number of different ways to distort a sound. However, when it comes to music, distortion is usually referring to something called “clipping”.

So what is clipping? To put it simply, it’s what happens when you turn stuff up too loud. Now we’re starting to sound like guitar players.

The first “distorted” guitar sounds created back in the 50s and 60s were created by doing just that: turning guitar amps up too much. The first song typically credited with having a distorted guitar is Link Wray’s “Rumble”, released in 1958. If you’ve ever heard it, it may not sound like the super-distorted sounds of hard rock or metal, but this is where it started.

When a signal is turned up too loud, the device the signal is passing through can no longer “handle” the signal, and it gets clipped. To distort our sound wave diagram above, it might look like this as we turn things up:

With the volume at, say, 5…

Now crank the volume to about 8:

And finally push that amp to 10:

You see how once things got turned up too loud, the sound wave moved past what the amp could handle? And tops and bottoms of the wave got cut off, or “clipped”? This is a visual representation of what happens when your crank your amp up and begin to distort the sound.

So is it that simple? Just turn the amp up all the way and you’re in distorted tone heaven? Well, kinda…

Stay tuned for Part II in the coming weeks to learn about the “Well, kinda…” part.

In the meantime, remember one thing… turning up your amp all the way can be dangerous for your hearing. Always use ear plugs and hearing protection. We can’t take any responsibility for making yourself deaf.