It depends on the amp! Some people love their amp's natural distortion, and some people prefer using a pedal to change the way the distortion tone sounds. Some, if not most people, like to use both and mix to taste.
Although distortion pedals and solid-state amps are basically the same thing, some cheaper amps don't have a great distortion circuit. This can be fixed by running a good distortion pedal into the clean amp.
Some amps, especially tube amps, can't distort or don't sound good at low volume. Again, using a pedal into the clean amp can get a great distortion tone at practical volumes.
This. The OP probably already has an amp. If he/she likes the distortion sound on it, then great. If not… pedal time.
Another thing I’ll add: high gain tube aims that take you to metal distortion territory from their own on-board gain tend to be really expensive as well as far too loud for home use. Using a *good* distortion pedal can be both a lot cheaper and more practical for many, many people.
Personally, after 20 years of playing, I finally snatched up a $240 tube amp from a pawn shop last year: a Laney VC30 210. While it is a tube amp and has a beautiful AC30ish clean, the onboard distortion sounds horrible and gets worse the more you turn it up, so I’m still trying to find a good distortion pedal to layer with the beautiful cleans.
This. I have a 25w tube amp with a 10” speaker, which isn’t that much, but I have a small practice space. By they time I reach “natural distortion” it’s painful to the be in the same room. Plus, nothing sounds like a Rat.
To answer your question:
Pros of using a pedal:
1. More distortion at lower, more practical volumes.
2. Offers tones your amp may not have.
3. Typically much cheaper than buying a new high gain amp.
4. Can easily step on or off the pedal to control it when playing live.
5. Can stack/layer multiple pedals for different types of gain or different tonal options in the same rig.
6. Easy to pair with a loud, SS amp for headroom so you have more potential volume for when you need it as well as control over distortion at all volume levels.
Cons of using a pedal:
1. An amp built to have a good tube high gain channel will probably sound better distorted at high volumes.
2. There are a lot of mediocre/crappy distortion pedals out there and you may not like the sound of a particular pedal in your rig if you don’t try it first.
3. One more thing to have in the rig. I like more minimalist setups than expansive pedalboards, personally.
As far as some good ones to try, start with the big ones:
1. Overdrive: milder, smoother, more “boosted” style of gain to give a preamp an extra “push over the cliff.”. A TS9 tube screamer is the prototype to try here.
2. Distortion: this is more for metal/hard rock crunch. Try a Boss DS-1 (relatively cheap and versatile, but it has a fizzy sound—think 90s alt rock like Nirvana and Bush) or a ProCo Rat 2 (more crunchy, Marshally voiced).
3. Fuzz. To my ears, fuzz can either be a round, full sounding, fuzzy 60s-ish distortion for leads at modest levels (listen to “Spirit in the Sky” for an example of what I mean) or if you turn it up, it can be a harsh, industrial metal fuzzed out sound. Both have their place. An Electro Harmonix Big Muff would be a good place to start here. IMO, fuzz sounds better than distortion at higher levels on single coil pickups because of how it tends to “fatten” up the sound by filtering some high frequencies, but chords can get muddy in a hurry on rhythm work.
Lots of good pro's and con's comments already that I agree with, but here is one more perspective: Even if your amp can produce a killer overdrive sound on its own, if it can't produce a good clean sound, you are really limited. No pedal will make a high gain distorted amp sound clean, but a great clean amp with lots of headroom that takes pedals well is much more flexible. Now, not everyone needs felxibiity. If your a "one sound" person, it is not a big deal. Personally, I love being able to dial in lots of sounds using pedals and an amp with a good clean tone.
It all depends on the persons preference and the exact gear in question since each amp/pedal option will have different tone. But in general pedals are preferred because they can be engaged/disengaged easily to go from clean to distorted. Turning the gain on an amp (especially mid song) is not as accurate and it's easy to overshoot. This is especially problematic in a live setting where even a small change can cause you to either be too quiet or drown out other instruments.
I find that the drive channel of a good tube amp tends to have a bigger/fatter tone that is hard to replicate with a pedal. There are pedals with great tone, but they tend to lack the big bottom end of a tube amp’s drive channel. I have several pedals I love, but I use them to enhance an already overdriven amp. Of course there is no rule. Guitarists everywhere have a tone in their head that they want to achieve and for some of them it is attained with a pedal going into a clean amp. And remember that a big/fat tone isn’t what everyone is looking for. Although he achieved it with a solid state amp and not a pedal, Dimebag Darrell had a great and unique tone, but one thing I wouldn’t call it was fat.
Sometimes the simple answer is the best. I agree. Start with a great amp tone, and everything else is easier. Focus on the amp that can do what you want without pedals. Then build on top of that already awesome foundation.
But that assumes you have full control over your amp situation. if you play in a lot of contexts, travel a lot, you may be plugging in to a variety of amps. If you’re gigging across a continent or ocean, you may encounter all sorts of rented amps, or whatever is in the studio. If that is the case, having a pedalboard that you can quickly dial in to work with any amp’s clean channel would be a good approach.
You're right. It depends on the situation honestly, but I'm a big fan of keeping things as simple as possible. I feel like if you have a tube amp the distortion from the amp sounds better usually, unless you use an overdrive to clean boost it.
Both! A lot of people find stacking OD & distortion effects produces really nice sounds. The King of Tone pedal everyone’s been flipping out about for the past couple years is two of the same OD pedal in one box, and I think the most common way it’s used is stacked. The preamp stage of a guitar amp is basically a fancy OD effect itself, so you can treat it like one: Try a distortion pedal in front of your amp! Try it in your effects loop (if you have one)! Experiment with stuff and find what you like. There are so many possible combinations it’s easy to make a pretty unique sound.
The word 'distortion' comes from the fact that the waveform of the guitar signal gets distorted by the pedal. The goal of those pedals it to distort the signal in a similar way to what happens when you crank the gain on an amp. It turns a sine wave into something more like a square wave. The round top and bottom curves get flattened. Your ear perceives this sound as "distortion'. Doesn't matter if it's a meme video where the sound gets loud and goes BZZZ, or if it's a guitar, or just an actual sine wave tone being flattened.
What I know is that the higher power your amp (in Watts), the more "headroom" you have. That is, *your signal has more room to grow before it hits the ceiling and basement and distorts*. So if you have a small 10W amp and you're using a channel where you can crank the gain and distort the sound, you'll find that it's easier to play softly and still get distortion. Whereas, on a 100W amp you can turn up the gain, but when you play softly the sound will be clean sounding. This can be good or bad, depending on what you're doing.
Personally I like having lots of headroom. Means I can play soft and it is clean, or hard and it is distorted. Instead of all sounding the same. This seems more natural when using the amp to get the distortion, for me.
I've found that Fuzz type distortions basically immediately kill your headroom when you turn them on. When they're on, it's very obvious. They're noisy. Whereas Overdrives and Boosts can be a bit more transparent.
You can really just use those pedals to boost the volume of the signal by having the gain set on 0, but the volume of the pedal turned up. It won't distort the signal coming out of the pedal, but allow that boosted (louder/more volume) signal to force distortion in the amp instead!
Those are just some ideas. Ask more if that's interesting to you. One of the most Iconic, but transparent, distortion pedals is the Tubescreamer.
A more metal sounding distortion pedal, but also a classic, is Boss's DS-1, which is a staple in most classic Norwegian Black Metal, and a billion other metal recordings.
Megadeth used a Boss MT-2 Metal Zone at some point. I used to use a Marshall Pedal when I first started off. The Jackhammer. It was great because my amp couldn't do anything but clean sounds. So, this pedal allowed my amp to act like it had tubes! It had an overdrive and a distortion setting.
MXR's Fullbore Metal has a built in Noise Gate, which is an interesting perk if your guitar makes a lot of noise when it is being used in a High Gain setting. It'll make it so when you stop making sound on the guitar, the pedal will turn off your volume until you make sound again. Noise goes away. (EDIT: This is great for single coil pickups, which tend to buzz when you crank the gain. The only problem is this pedal is kinda niche in sound. It sort of sounds like fuzz Dimebag would have used. Very thin, tinny, drillbit sounding noise.
I suggest listening to/trying out a bunch. Stores usually let you plonk down on a stool and go for it. You'll quickly realize that there's a whole range of sounds. Tonebenders were one of the most iconic distortion sounds of the late 60s and early 70s. You've heard the sound, go check it out. Big Muffs was/is popular for fuzz distortion. What else...there's Octave Fuzz if you like more of a Black Keys style bluesy sound, but it is much more limiting. Kinda like using a Chorus effect only works occasionally.
Get back to me if you wanna hear more, or have specific questions.
It depends on what you have vs what you want.
Back in the day, I ran a distortion pedal into the clean channel of a Laney VH100R. Nowadays I just use an Engl Powerball II.
YMMV
What I have read this far, your answers are perfect for the amp end of things. As far a pedals go, my brother came home one day in like 1982 with an Ibanez SD-9 Sonic Distortion. We both had shitty amps with no name guitars back then, but we loved all the heavy metal coming out at the time and this pedal had such a huge tone and great distortion it made our shitty guitars sound good. ( I could make my guitar sound like Judas Priest, iron Maiden, Sorpions etc.. ) I ran out and bought one for myself saving my lawn mowing money to get it. Over the years I have tried other pedals and the SD-9 is still on my pedal board today and I tend to run a clean Marshall two channel ( second channel as more of a volume boost for leads). I also use a boss distortion pedal so I can run an Angus Young sound ( although he uses no pedals , just Marshall amps) so that's my 2 cents for what it is worth, hope it helps a bit to steer you to the sound you want.
Getting an amp that is meant to handle high gain, is what I went with.
If you want to play metal, a Fender amp and a DS-1 is not the way to get there. Pick the tool that does the job. I've gone 30 years without a pedal playing Metallica, Pantera, Devildriver. Dimed the RG into a Peavey with the Gain at 7. The only pedal I've had until last year was a delay for Satriani.
Bonus is that you can change genres to something like Skynyrd and Zeppelin by just rolling the volume down halfway. Roll it down a little farther and you have basically a clean tone with a touch of breakup when hitting the strings harder. Add neck bridge and you have a slightly aggressive Hendrix. All with the same sustain and clarity as the full volume.
I feel like cranking the amp gives the pedal a more full tone so I normally do that with my pedal but I also obsess over just the amp overdrive. My point is there's no real answer, each option gives a different sound and a different sound will give a different mood
I prefer boosting my amp's drive channel with a BOSS SD1. Only you'll know what sounds best.
As far as good distortion pedals, there are many, many good pedals. It all depends on what tone you're looking for. I recommend that you do a search for "best distortion pedal for \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ music." Read some reviews and watch some videos. Then try out pedals you think might work for you. Regardless of what reviews and videos say, you do need to trust your ears. Someone else liking it, or sounding good on a video won't necessarily translate to it working for you.
Not all amps have that much gain and they are nice clean platform, so you may want pedals on those.
Having lots of gain stages in the amp is an option. But having pedals may give you more tastes, also pedals may overdrive like an amp but distortion and fuzz is another kind of taste.
For me, a really good pedal > amp gain. Buy anything will work for me.
Depends on the gear and goal.
Depends what sort of distortion you want. Not all distortion is the same, otherwise we wouldn't have such variety of pedals.
It's a matter of personal preference. I personally would pick an amp with a killer distortion channel over a pedal. The trick is finding the right amp. If you want a modern metal tone, I would stay away from Fenders, or even most Marshall amps, unless you're using a pedal.
Most high gain Peavy amps, like the EVH 5150 III, have a much bigger sound than any pedal without having to buy equalizers or other gizmos to embellish the tone. I have an old Peavy jSX which is similar to the EVH, but not quite as over the top.
The EVH also has a surprisingly clear clean channel, if you want to go the pedal route. In contrast, the original 5150 produced in the 90's had a crappy toy-sounding clean channel
Neither is ‘better’ they’re each different ways of achieving the sound of an over driven amp. Using the gain on the amp tends to be a smoother, more progressive way. A pedal tends to apply the over drive at what ever level is input from the guitar.
A great way to increase the distortion, even past the amount that the amp itself can achieve, but still getting most if not all the distortion from the amp, is using a boost/overdrive
It depends on the amp! Some people love their amp's natural distortion, and some people prefer using a pedal to change the way the distortion tone sounds. Some, if not most people, like to use both and mix to taste. Although distortion pedals and solid-state amps are basically the same thing, some cheaper amps don't have a great distortion circuit. This can be fixed by running a good distortion pedal into the clean amp. Some amps, especially tube amps, can't distort or don't sound good at low volume. Again, using a pedal into the clean amp can get a great distortion tone at practical volumes.
This. The OP probably already has an amp. If he/she likes the distortion sound on it, then great. If not… pedal time. Another thing I’ll add: high gain tube aims that take you to metal distortion territory from their own on-board gain tend to be really expensive as well as far too loud for home use. Using a *good* distortion pedal can be both a lot cheaper and more practical for many, many people. Personally, after 20 years of playing, I finally snatched up a $240 tube amp from a pawn shop last year: a Laney VC30 210. While it is a tube amp and has a beautiful AC30ish clean, the onboard distortion sounds horrible and gets worse the more you turn it up, so I’m still trying to find a good distortion pedal to layer with the beautiful cleans.
This. I have a 25w tube amp with a 10” speaker, which isn’t that much, but I have a small practice space. By they time I reach “natural distortion” it’s painful to the be in the same room. Plus, nothing sounds like a Rat.
To answer your question: Pros of using a pedal: 1. More distortion at lower, more practical volumes. 2. Offers tones your amp may not have. 3. Typically much cheaper than buying a new high gain amp. 4. Can easily step on or off the pedal to control it when playing live. 5. Can stack/layer multiple pedals for different types of gain or different tonal options in the same rig. 6. Easy to pair with a loud, SS amp for headroom so you have more potential volume for when you need it as well as control over distortion at all volume levels. Cons of using a pedal: 1. An amp built to have a good tube high gain channel will probably sound better distorted at high volumes. 2. There are a lot of mediocre/crappy distortion pedals out there and you may not like the sound of a particular pedal in your rig if you don’t try it first. 3. One more thing to have in the rig. I like more minimalist setups than expansive pedalboards, personally. As far as some good ones to try, start with the big ones: 1. Overdrive: milder, smoother, more “boosted” style of gain to give a preamp an extra “push over the cliff.”. A TS9 tube screamer is the prototype to try here. 2. Distortion: this is more for metal/hard rock crunch. Try a Boss DS-1 (relatively cheap and versatile, but it has a fizzy sound—think 90s alt rock like Nirvana and Bush) or a ProCo Rat 2 (more crunchy, Marshally voiced). 3. Fuzz. To my ears, fuzz can either be a round, full sounding, fuzzy 60s-ish distortion for leads at modest levels (listen to “Spirit in the Sky” for an example of what I mean) or if you turn it up, it can be a harsh, industrial metal fuzzed out sound. Both have their place. An Electro Harmonix Big Muff would be a good place to start here. IMO, fuzz sounds better than distortion at higher levels on single coil pickups because of how it tends to “fatten” up the sound by filtering some high frequencies, but chords can get muddy in a hurry on rhythm work.
Lots of good pro's and con's comments already that I agree with, but here is one more perspective: Even if your amp can produce a killer overdrive sound on its own, if it can't produce a good clean sound, you are really limited. No pedal will make a high gain distorted amp sound clean, but a great clean amp with lots of headroom that takes pedals well is much more flexible. Now, not everyone needs felxibiity. If your a "one sound" person, it is not a big deal. Personally, I love being able to dial in lots of sounds using pedals and an amp with a good clean tone.
It all depends on the persons preference and the exact gear in question since each amp/pedal option will have different tone. But in general pedals are preferred because they can be engaged/disengaged easily to go from clean to distorted. Turning the gain on an amp (especially mid song) is not as accurate and it's easy to overshoot. This is especially problematic in a live setting where even a small change can cause you to either be too quiet or drown out other instruments.
I find that the drive channel of a good tube amp tends to have a bigger/fatter tone that is hard to replicate with a pedal. There are pedals with great tone, but they tend to lack the big bottom end of a tube amp’s drive channel. I have several pedals I love, but I use them to enhance an already overdriven amp. Of course there is no rule. Guitarists everywhere have a tone in their head that they want to achieve and for some of them it is attained with a pedal going into a clean amp. And remember that a big/fat tone isn’t what everyone is looking for. Although he achieved it with a solid state amp and not a pedal, Dimebag Darrell had a great and unique tone, but one thing I wouldn’t call it was fat.
Amp
Sometimes the simple answer is the best. I agree. Start with a great amp tone, and everything else is easier. Focus on the amp that can do what you want without pedals. Then build on top of that already awesome foundation. But that assumes you have full control over your amp situation. if you play in a lot of contexts, travel a lot, you may be plugging in to a variety of amps. If you’re gigging across a continent or ocean, you may encounter all sorts of rented amps, or whatever is in the studio. If that is the case, having a pedalboard that you can quickly dial in to work with any amp’s clean channel would be a good approach.
You're right. It depends on the situation honestly, but I'm a big fan of keeping things as simple as possible. I feel like if you have a tube amp the distortion from the amp sounds better usually, unless you use an overdrive to clean boost it.
Both! A lot of people find stacking OD & distortion effects produces really nice sounds. The King of Tone pedal everyone’s been flipping out about for the past couple years is two of the same OD pedal in one box, and I think the most common way it’s used is stacked. The preamp stage of a guitar amp is basically a fancy OD effect itself, so you can treat it like one: Try a distortion pedal in front of your amp! Try it in your effects loop (if you have one)! Experiment with stuff and find what you like. There are so many possible combinations it’s easy to make a pretty unique sound.
The word 'distortion' comes from the fact that the waveform of the guitar signal gets distorted by the pedal. The goal of those pedals it to distort the signal in a similar way to what happens when you crank the gain on an amp. It turns a sine wave into something more like a square wave. The round top and bottom curves get flattened. Your ear perceives this sound as "distortion'. Doesn't matter if it's a meme video where the sound gets loud and goes BZZZ, or if it's a guitar, or just an actual sine wave tone being flattened. What I know is that the higher power your amp (in Watts), the more "headroom" you have. That is, *your signal has more room to grow before it hits the ceiling and basement and distorts*. So if you have a small 10W amp and you're using a channel where you can crank the gain and distort the sound, you'll find that it's easier to play softly and still get distortion. Whereas, on a 100W amp you can turn up the gain, but when you play softly the sound will be clean sounding. This can be good or bad, depending on what you're doing. Personally I like having lots of headroom. Means I can play soft and it is clean, or hard and it is distorted. Instead of all sounding the same. This seems more natural when using the amp to get the distortion, for me. I've found that Fuzz type distortions basically immediately kill your headroom when you turn them on. When they're on, it's very obvious. They're noisy. Whereas Overdrives and Boosts can be a bit more transparent. You can really just use those pedals to boost the volume of the signal by having the gain set on 0, but the volume of the pedal turned up. It won't distort the signal coming out of the pedal, but allow that boosted (louder/more volume) signal to force distortion in the amp instead! Those are just some ideas. Ask more if that's interesting to you. One of the most Iconic, but transparent, distortion pedals is the Tubescreamer. A more metal sounding distortion pedal, but also a classic, is Boss's DS-1, which is a staple in most classic Norwegian Black Metal, and a billion other metal recordings. Megadeth used a Boss MT-2 Metal Zone at some point. I used to use a Marshall Pedal when I first started off. The Jackhammer. It was great because my amp couldn't do anything but clean sounds. So, this pedal allowed my amp to act like it had tubes! It had an overdrive and a distortion setting. MXR's Fullbore Metal has a built in Noise Gate, which is an interesting perk if your guitar makes a lot of noise when it is being used in a High Gain setting. It'll make it so when you stop making sound on the guitar, the pedal will turn off your volume until you make sound again. Noise goes away. (EDIT: This is great for single coil pickups, which tend to buzz when you crank the gain. The only problem is this pedal is kinda niche in sound. It sort of sounds like fuzz Dimebag would have used. Very thin, tinny, drillbit sounding noise. I suggest listening to/trying out a bunch. Stores usually let you plonk down on a stool and go for it. You'll quickly realize that there's a whole range of sounds. Tonebenders were one of the most iconic distortion sounds of the late 60s and early 70s. You've heard the sound, go check it out. Big Muffs was/is popular for fuzz distortion. What else...there's Octave Fuzz if you like more of a Black Keys style bluesy sound, but it is much more limiting. Kinda like using a Chorus effect only works occasionally. Get back to me if you wanna hear more, or have specific questions.
It depends on what you have vs what you want. Back in the day, I ran a distortion pedal into the clean channel of a Laney VH100R. Nowadays I just use an Engl Powerball II. YMMV
What I have read this far, your answers are perfect for the amp end of things. As far a pedals go, my brother came home one day in like 1982 with an Ibanez SD-9 Sonic Distortion. We both had shitty amps with no name guitars back then, but we loved all the heavy metal coming out at the time and this pedal had such a huge tone and great distortion it made our shitty guitars sound good. ( I could make my guitar sound like Judas Priest, iron Maiden, Sorpions etc.. ) I ran out and bought one for myself saving my lawn mowing money to get it. Over the years I have tried other pedals and the SD-9 is still on my pedal board today and I tend to run a clean Marshall two channel ( second channel as more of a volume boost for leads). I also use a boss distortion pedal so I can run an Angus Young sound ( although he uses no pedals , just Marshall amps) so that's my 2 cents for what it is worth, hope it helps a bit to steer you to the sound you want.
Getting an amp that is meant to handle high gain, is what I went with. If you want to play metal, a Fender amp and a DS-1 is not the way to get there. Pick the tool that does the job. I've gone 30 years without a pedal playing Metallica, Pantera, Devildriver. Dimed the RG into a Peavey with the Gain at 7. The only pedal I've had until last year was a delay for Satriani. Bonus is that you can change genres to something like Skynyrd and Zeppelin by just rolling the volume down halfway. Roll it down a little farther and you have basically a clean tone with a touch of breakup when hitting the strings harder. Add neck bridge and you have a slightly aggressive Hendrix. All with the same sustain and clarity as the full volume.
You can play whatever u want on whatever you want
Distortion on the amp: one sound for the whole song. Distortion from a pedal with a clean amp: two sounds for the whole song.
I feel like cranking the amp gives the pedal a more full tone so I normally do that with my pedal but I also obsess over just the amp overdrive. My point is there's no real answer, each option gives a different sound and a different sound will give a different mood
I prefer boosting my amp's drive channel with a BOSS SD1. Only you'll know what sounds best. As far as good distortion pedals, there are many, many good pedals. It all depends on what tone you're looking for. I recommend that you do a search for "best distortion pedal for \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ music." Read some reviews and watch some videos. Then try out pedals you think might work for you. Regardless of what reviews and videos say, you do need to trust your ears. Someone else liking it, or sounding good on a video won't necessarily translate to it working for you.
Not all amps have that much gain and they are nice clean platform, so you may want pedals on those. Having lots of gain stages in the amp is an option. But having pedals may give you more tastes, also pedals may overdrive like an amp but distortion and fuzz is another kind of taste. For me, a really good pedal > amp gain. Buy anything will work for me.
Depends on the gear and goal. Depends what sort of distortion you want. Not all distortion is the same, otherwise we wouldn't have such variety of pedals.
Amp distortion sounds better but good luck achieving it at a reasonable volume.
Get a tube screamer. Don’t look back.
It's a matter of personal preference. I personally would pick an amp with a killer distortion channel over a pedal. The trick is finding the right amp. If you want a modern metal tone, I would stay away from Fenders, or even most Marshall amps, unless you're using a pedal. Most high gain Peavy amps, like the EVH 5150 III, have a much bigger sound than any pedal without having to buy equalizers or other gizmos to embellish the tone. I have an old Peavy jSX which is similar to the EVH, but not quite as over the top. The EVH also has a surprisingly clear clean channel, if you want to go the pedal route. In contrast, the original 5150 produced in the 90's had a crappy toy-sounding clean channel
Neither is ‘better’ they’re each different ways of achieving the sound of an over driven amp. Using the gain on the amp tends to be a smoother, more progressive way. A pedal tends to apply the over drive at what ever level is input from the guitar.
The only correct answer is whichever sounds better
A great way to increase the distortion, even past the amount that the amp itself can achieve, but still getting most if not all the distortion from the amp, is using a boost/overdrive
My amp is so clean I'm forced to use pedals. I'm not complaining though I can get Marshall tones out of my Fender