You took a master voume valve amplifier, turned all the knobs up until the signal was no longer produced cleanly, and hope that the amplfiier didn't 'malfunction'! In so far as overdriving a valve guitar amplifier is concerned, that was pretty much it. No longer was it necessary to have a clean guitar sound to be cool, in fact quite the opposite became true, and it was realised that the guitar signal would similarly clip and therefore be distorted if the amplifier was turned up beyond it's ability to reproduce a signal cleanly.Ĭhuck Berry is perhaps one of the best known purveyors of the early overdriven valve guitar amplifier route to clipping distortion using valve amplifiers smaller than would be required to produce sounds at band level cleanly. Youtube Video: Ike Turner 'Rocket 88' 1951 One of the earliest 'distorted' guitar sounds on a released recording is considered to be Rocket 88 by Ike Turner which apparently occured due to the amplifier suffering accidental damage before a gig leading to a sound which everyone loved and which was then carried over to the record. The young post WWII generation had money in their pockets, a postive can do attitude and the new sounds coming out the radio were coined as being 'rock'n'roll'. However during the 1950s in the USA a new wave of music came along that threw out many of the of the old rules. Getting the sounds both clean and without feedback led to amplifier development and also to the semi-acoustic and solid body electric guitars being invented. Indeed the whole idea of the electric guitar pickup and valve guitar amplifier was simply to amplify the sound of the guitar in a big band setting as loudly and cleanly as possible to hold up to the acoustic volume of the drums and brass instruments used in the music of the 1920s-1940s. Once upon a time all electric guitar amplifiers were used within their operational limits (not overdriven) to produce essentially quite 'clean' sounding tones.

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