It's hard to imagine rock music without guitar distortion: Jimi Hendrix's albums would be unthinkable. Punk rock couldn't have happened. Metallica might have wound up sounding like Barry Manilow.

Before Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton were squealing and grinding their way through the minor pentatonic scale, Buddy Guy was discovering entirely new sounds on the guitar, like feedback and distortion ...

A look at the evolution of the technologies that give rock its signature sound Fifty years ago, a faulty connection in a mixing board gave birth to fuzz, which is a term of art. Although it came to ...

Music making is increasingly digitized here in 2020, but some analog audio effects are still very difficult to reproduce in this way. One of those effects is the kind of screeching guitar distortion ...

On Tuesday at Boston University, guitarist Giacomo Baldelli will perform a recital of modern works for the electric guitar, including Tristan Murail’s singular 1984 piece “Vampyr!” Murail first ...

The rock music of the 1990s has been raging back in recent months, and with it, new acts are cropping up that seem to be drawn to the era's frayed noise and hooky, guitar-driven melodies. Among the ...

Ever since Jimi Hendrix brought guitar distortion to the forefront of rock and roll, pedals to control the distortion have been a standard piece of equipment for almost every guitarist. Now, there are ...

Guitarists will do just about anything to get just the right sound out of their setup, including purposely introducing all manner of distortion into the signal. It seems counter-intuitive, but it ...

It’s probably common knowledge that a significant number of tech people – electronics engineers/designers to computer programmers/software engineers – found their way into the electronics arena by way ...

There’s nothing quite like stepping on a pedal and hearing the gritty growl of heavy distortion. Deforming your guitar signal to the point that it screams back at you is incredibly satisfying so ...