Because guitar drive pedals have played such a significant role in the music to emerge throughout the last 60+ years, there are many options to choose from. There are different branches of drive pedals that exist, each one providing an alternate approach to giving your guitar signal an extra bit of growl. Guitar players tend to be pretty picky when it comes to choosing a pedal that best fits their style and works well within their pre-existing rig, so trying them out for yourself is a must. But before you do that, there are some things you should know about when it comes to selecting one of these iconic pedals.
Overdrive
Overdrive pedals provide the most subtle form of drive. The very first overdrive pedals were designed to work in conjunction with tube amplifiers, pushing a greater amount of signal into the amp to create a slightly dirty, more powerful tone. With the popularity of solid state amps, more overdrive pedals have been designed to provide the same sound without having to rely on the amplifier’s actual tubes.
With a warm and “pushed” sound that’s still under tighter control than some of the more extreme versions of drive pedals available on the market, the overdrive pedal has played a significant role in the signature sounds of players such as Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Johnson. Through the tweaking of the pedal’s knobs and settings, guitarists can use the pedal to craft a sound that is distinctly their own.
Distortion
If overdrive pedals played a huge role in the sound and direction of popular music starting in the middle of the 20th century, the distortion pedal specifically would have to be the poster child of that movement. Due to their prevalent use in nearly every incarnation of rock music since the genre’s inception, there may be more distortion pedals on the market than any other type of guitar effect.
Taking the overdrive pedal concept to an over-the-top extreme, distortion pedals provide their own tone rather than enhancing the sound of an amplifier and/or tubes. With a sound that’s more “in the box”, distortion pedals allow players to tweak both EQ and compression settings to sculpt sounds that can be described as jagged and metallic. If you’re looking to bring an unstoppable fury to your guitar sound, distortion pedals are the answer.
Fuzz
Taking the distortion pedal concept a step even further is the fuzz pedal. The fuzz effect thickens up a guitar tone to such extremes that it’s typically used sparingly and often as a slight addition to a distortion or overdrive pedal to boost a guitar part just over the edge. With controllable parameters for the effect’s volume level and “fuzz”, the sound produced with fuzz pedals is also very responsive to external factors, such as how a guitarist utilizes pick attack and how loud the instrument is turned up.
Although it’s place in the hierarchy of drive pedals may make it seem like some sort of unmanageable wrecking ball, fuzz pedals are remarkably malleable to performance and interaction with other effects pedals in a guitar rig. If you’re looking for a classic example of fuzz guitar in its most realized glory, you don’t need to look any further than many classic songs and performances by Jimi Hendrix.
Boosters
The booster is a drive pedal that’s truly the most simple of all, as it effectively just functions as a preamp placed before an amplifier’s input. By design, they don’t add any color or tone; instead, they simply take the sound of a guitar and boost it (hence the name).
Although they are often just used to make the signal louder (a technique often necessary in rigs using either several guitar pedals or cables that stretch out for many feet), some of them have been known to add a slight mid-to-high-end boost that’s desirable for lead guitar parts. Legends such as Brian May of Queen and Eric Clapton all used booster pedals to really make some of their guitar parts soar and stand out in the mix.