Summary: A distortion pedal for a guitar has controls for volume, tone control and gain, which can be used and mixed to create a number of different effects. Learn about the sustain created by distortion pedals with help from an experienced guitar player in this free video on distortion pedals.
Rick Tobey has been playing guitar for over 30 years. He plays professionally as a solo blues artist and in his band. His blues band won the 2007 Cape Fear Blues Challenge last month...read more
"Hi, I'm Rick Tobey. I play lead guitar with the Chicken Head Blues Band and I'm going to talk to you about how a distortion pedal works. Now the type of distortion pedal I prefer to use is a Boss Blues Driver. It looks like this. You can see it has basically three controls. So, level control, this basically controls the volume of the guitar. This little dial here is a tone control and you can go from kind of a very basic sound to very trebelly sound. And this is the gain. The gain is what controls the amount of distortion and it works together with the level. In other words, the higher the gain, the louder the guitar is going to be. So if you don't want it to be too loud, you would control the volume with the level. And I have one of these hooked up to my pedal board. This is how it sounds without the distortion pedal (music playing), very nice clean sound. But if I hit the distortion pedal (music playing), so it gives you a nice full distorted sound (music playing) and it also gives you a nice sustained. And as I said, if you dial the gain up higher, let me turn the volume down a little bit, you get, you can get even more sustained. And that's how a distortion pedal works."
eHow Article: How Does a Distortion Pedal Work?
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