When the Kinks guitarist plugged one amplifier into another in the 1960s, the discovered the first distortion effect and from then on, fuzz boxes were invented to allow guitarists to use the distorted effect with just …show more content…
1950’s: Blues and Jazz used around 15watt valve amps on maximum settings. The first Commercial amplifier was made by fender (Leo Fender) who worked with Dick Dale, a surf rock guitarist known as the king of the surf guitar, who is now 78 years old, in developing a guitar amp that he got up to 100watts without it being broken. Fender then was called K&F manufacturing. The Les Paul amp is developed.
1960’s: Guitarists in this era began experimenting with the sound of distortion from their amplifiers, including guitarists who would plug one amp into another, or use razors the rip the amp face, or simply use their hands to rip the amp and create an overdriven sound which were very popular in the blues and rock music. VOX introduce loud, distorted amplifiers. Fender introduced Blackface amps which were known to be reliable and have a great tone. Fender also incorporated spring reverb into their amps. Experimenting with build in distortion buttons in valve amps began. Since the 1960’s , not a lot has changed in guitar …show more content…
These came with additional controls at a preamp stage which helped the guitarists to control the amount of drive, volume and the EQ.
1980’s: Distortion pedals were made for heavy metal guitarists, however was soon taken up by punk rock and hard-core bands that wanted the most distorted sounds possible.
1990’s: Digital distortion was developed in which the audio sent from a guitar is converted from analogue to digital and computers produce similar sounds to the effect. Many Grunge bands like Alice in Chains, Kyuss (later queens of the Stone Age) and Soundgarden took this up through the use of fuzz preamps, which was also used in blues and