Guitar Nuts: Here’s a Cool History of Guitar Effects Over the Decades
Don’t know your wah-wah from your fuzz? Then breeze through his history of guitar effects from NPR?
Musicians, it seems, have always wanted to alter the sounds of their instruments. Over the course of centuries, strings have been added to guitars for a fuller sound. The composition of those strings has changed from animal gut to steel to plastic, each with their own unique sounds. Drummers have tried different shaped pots and kettles for the bodies of their instruments to get different timbres.
But with the advent of electronics, the possibilities for tweaking the sound of one instrument exploded. And perhaps nobody has done more tweaking than electric guitarists.
Sitting in his Bethel, Conn., workshop, pedal maker Mike Piera plugs in a vintage electric guitar and demonstrates what a fuzz box can do by playing part of Cream’s “Sunshine Of Your Love.”
“Without the pedal, you just kinda get a dead sound,” Piera says. “Pretty boring.”
The box makes the guitar sound fuzzy by distorting its sound. This is something musicians have been intentionally trying to do since the earliest days of amplification. Many credit the first deliberately distorted electric guitar to Johnny Burnette’s Rock ‘n Roll Trio in 1956.
Two years later, Link Wray claimed he’d stabbed a hole in the speaker of his amp when he challenged listeners to a “Rumble.”
