Where does "twang" end and "distortion" begin?

[cousinpaul]

Probably not for everyone. I've been messing around with what I call a reverse tilt on the bridge pickup. It involves lowering the high E side of the pickup for a bit sweeter tone and raising the low E side to add body. It's counter-intuitive but one way to pull a little different voice from a tele or strat bridge pickup. YMMV.

 

[Swirling Snow]

The one thing I'm doing differently this time around making the switch to electric guitar (unlike 15 years ago when I briefly tried and basically failed) is I've been thinking of my pedals+amp as the instrument. The image I always have in mind is a big old pipe organ where you can set different stops and use combinations of pipes to make a range of timbres and the keyboard is just how to intiate the whole sound-making process.

Back then I think my idea was, an electric guitar is like a really quiet and plinky sounding version of an acoustic guitar that you can make really, really loud with an amplifier. Or something like that. It didn't really work out!

But to your first point...

Last night I did some comparison playing each pickup (neck and bridge) into the Katana clean channel with the Gain down around 1/4 and then with it up at maybe 9/10. Even just playing single-note pentatonic patterns on the neck pickup there was a lot of what I think would be called distortion showing on on the higher Gain versus "squeaky clean" with Gain down low.

So for my purposes, my own personal lingo, I'm going to call "twang" the thing that my neck pickup has a little of and the bridge has a lot of and I'm going to call "distortion" the thing that's there with the Gain up and gone with the Gain down. That seems to clarify it in my mind.

Now let me ask one other newbie-ish question. When people talk about something like a Twin Reverb have high clean headroom, are they saying on a Twin as you turn up the Gain it stays "squeaky clean" much higher than most amps? Higher than the clean channel on my Katana?

Yes, exactly.

Simply, Twins' amps are so powerful and their speakers so efficient, they don't need help from the preamp to makes lots of noise. So Twin preamps are relatively low gain because the amps get so loud so fast. That means ears are bleeding before the amp is distorting.

 

[Nogoodnamesleft]

I think of distortion as saturation of a signal and twang as a filter and amplitude envelope - attack, decay, sustain, release - in one. Both have amplitude and a tendency to accentuate high frequencies the louder the signal is.

 

[tfarny]

Guess what I'm really trying to suss out is what part of the tone is coming from the guitar and its pickups versus the part that's a dirty amp or a dirt pedal.


Mostly that lead guitar sounds like an amp or pedal that's breaking up, right?

The trick is that there is no "part of the tone" that is coming from one thing and another part from another. There is only one sound coming out of that speaker. IOW no guitar and no guitar pickup produces a "distorted" sound on its own. It can produce a higher output signal with a lot of mids and bass content, and that will distort an amp that cannot handle that amount of output, but neither one makes any sound on its own!

 

[Peegoo]

Where does "twang" end and "distortion" begin?​

Right here at 2:39 in this vid.

 

[Brent Hutto]

Where does "twang" end and "distortion" begin?​

Right here at 2:39 in this vid.

Excellent bit of education for me there. I appreciate it.

 

[PigBoy]

Usually after the third whiskey…

 

[schotter611]

I do enjoy fiddling about on neck or middle position, just below (perceivable) breakup (vox clean, mind you) and, when going to bridge, I am always surprised how much karrang and bite I get with pretty much the same volume...twangstortion!

 

[Brent Hutto]

...twangstortion!

There we go. That's what Telecasters are all about.

I was just playing around with Blues Driver effect (built-in to my Katana) along with maxing the gain on the Clean channel. That gets something that's not ever quite clean but it can clearly demonstrate the difference between Distortion (on the neck) and Twangstortion (on the bridge). Fun stuff!

 

[SPUDCASTER]

Right about the point when I reach down. Roll the volume on full and launch into the lead on The Fugitive or Mama Tried.

 

[Brent Hutto]

OK, turns out Santa made an early stop at our house yesterday (trying to get it done before the cold weather got here?) and brought me my first real overdrive pedal. A pretty blue MXR Timmy. In truth Santa knew where there was a mint condition Tim V3 but couldn't get it before Christmas, even Santa has to deal with supply chain issues apparently.

So last night and this morning I've been experimenting. It took a while but I found a med-high gain setting that I really like for some bridge pickup "Twangstortion" when I play that 28th of January tune. Not really trying to duplicate Michael Daves wide-open tone but my own very distorted, kind of compressed take on the fiddle tune. A nice thing about it was I made it work using Timmy's clipping so I can just my amps set to my favorite clean and sweet settings then stomp on the switch when I want to get un-clean and un-sweet.

There is a little 4-5dB volume jump when I add Timmy but I normally play VERY quiet (peaks around 75-76dBA) so it's not killing my ears to play a little louder once in a while. Or I could get my fat backside off the chair and go turn down the master volume a little!

I've started experimenting with a lower-gain, smooth-clipping tweak to that Timmy setting that sounds good as a slightly thicker, not-quite-clean version of my normal neck pickup tone. So far it's kind of neat but that's not really my main reason for wanting an overdrive. I like my normal perfectly clean tone just fine for 90% of my playing.

 

[ChicknPickn]

Raises the question of whether there is such a thing as "pure tone."

 

[Fiesta Red]

How about twangy distortion:

Thanks for those.

So take the "Chunk of Coal" guitar solo for instance. To me that sounds 90% twangy and 10% distorted (or whatever numbers we might want to put on it). Is that what people might call "gritty" rather than full-on "dirt"? Or am I hearing it wrong and there's a lot of distortion in there?

The proper word is “Fantabulous”

 

[Brent Hutto]

Raises the question of whether there is such a thing as "pure tone."

I think as a purely [pun intended] scientific exercise you could create a "pure guitar tone" but nobody'd want to listen to it for longer than the 30 seconds it took to confirm that yep, that's pretty pure. I guess you could make some pickups that stayed a long way from the strings to avoid any electromagnetic pull on them, use body/bridge/saddles/neck that were totally inert and a instrumentation quality low-distortion amplifier.

Probably it would sound like plink-plink-plink...

 

[ChicknPickn]

I think as a purely [pun intended] scientific exercise you could create a "pure guitar tone" but nobody'd want to listen to it for longer than the 30 seconds it took to confirm that yep, that's pretty pure. I guess you could make some pickups that stayed a long way from the strings to avoid any electromagnetic pull on them, use body/bridge/saddles/neck that were totally inert and a instrumentation quality low-distortion amplifier.

Probably it would sound like plink-plink-plink...

I have heard the sound coming from tone generators before. Without the "distortions" we're used to - - reverberation, atmospheric effects, attenuation, etc., it sounds robotic and almost disturbing. If you've had a hearing test lately, you know what I mean.

 

[arlum]

If you're looking for a super clean amp voice with no distortion I'd recommend turning the gain completely off and then opening up the volume / master as far as you can. I don't play solid state amps but on a tube amp you won't get any sound even with the volume on 10 until you start to bring the gain up. The cleanest possible tone is having the volume / master volume controls maxed out first and then slowly bring up the gain until you reach the volume you desire. The only thing that will then play apart it the wattage of the amp. The more watts the amp has the cleaner the amps voice will be because the added wattage allows you to use less gain to equal the same volume. Low wattage "bedroom" amps are popular with players going for that cranked concert voice without blowing their eardrums out because they allow for breakup / distortion at much lower volume levels. The only players who would never want these lower wattage "bedroom" amps would be players looking for the cleanest of cleans. More watts equal more headroom.

 

[Brent Hutto]

If you're looking for a super clean amp voice with no distortion I'd recommend turning the gain completely off and then opening up the volume / master as far as you can. I don't play solid state amps but on a tube amp you won't get any sound even with the volume on 10 until you start to bring the gain up. The cleanest possible tone is having the volume / master volume controls maxed out first and then slowly bring up the gain until you reach the volume you desire. The only thing that will then play apart it the wattage of the amp. The more watts the amp has the cleaner the amps voice will be because the added wattage allows you to use less gain to equal the same volume. Low wattage "bedroom" amps are popular with players going for that cranked concert voice without blowing their eardrums out because they allow for breakup / distortion at much lower volume levels. The only players who would never want these lower wattage "bedroom" amps would be players looking for the cleanest of cleans. More watts equal more headroom.

When I got my Telecaster and was looking for my "stock" Katana settings to use with it, I did something close to what you're describing. Volume and Master Volume up and gradually increase the Gain.

I must not like really cleaner-than-clean because I found the sound distinctly uninteresting and blah until I got the Gain up above 50 (on a 0-100 scale), which of course meant turning down the Volume becuase it got pretty loud. Eventually I settled on Gain and Volume both around 70 and use the Master to keep things quiet in my living room.

I can't actually hear any grit or edge to the tone with Gain=70 but when I turn it down the tone definitely loses a little something. Thins out a little.

All that's with my Telecaster. I have an Ibanez with two very high output humbuckers and I can go right on down to 20 or 30 on the Gain. In fact, even the Clean channel does start to distort a with Gain=70 and the humbuckers.

My stock Katana settings for the Tele are Gain and Volume around 70, Bass and Midrange around 50, Treble dialed back to about 40 and the Presence (which doesn't make much difference in sound to my Tinnitus-affected ears) I just leave about halfway up or so.

 

[Peter Random]

Sometimes when I'm listening to a guitar being played, I can't tell if I'm hearing "twang" or "distortion" or both. Does that even make sense?

I have always played on my Telecaster's neck pickup with a completely clean amp (i.e., on the "Clean" channel of my Katana with the Gain set more or less around noon and no boost/overdrive/distortion effects or compressors). A smooth, pristine sound suits the kinds of stuff I usually play.

But lately I've branched out into trying a little more gain on the amp (and/or activating something like a Blue Driver on the amp's Boosts effects) and I've also even played around a little bit with the bridge pickup. It's when I flip the switch to the bridge that my question arises.

It sounds to me like even with my normal squeaky-clean amp settings, chords strummed on the bridge can sound a lot like what I'm tempted to call "distortion". Single notes are twangy and bright, bordering on harsh but chords start getting their overtones all clashy and, well, kind of distorted.

So what am I hearing? Is the bridge pickup literally driving the amp hard enough to make it break up? Seems hard to believe, these are single coils into a what seems like a really high headroom SS amp. Or does the bridge pickup just generate enough overtones that my ears get fooled into hearing distortion?

I know this is a half-baked question. But it's something I can't figure out well enough to even ask about it in a sensible way.

I have never Understood Why the Telecaster is so Country fied. To Me it is a rock guitar. The Twang sound is not something I am fond of