It starts with a melodic clean guitar with a catchy feel and ends with power thumps and a screaming guitar solo that gets your foot tapping whether you want it to or not. I am talking about Led Zepplin's Stairway to Heaven, one of the most noted songs ever recorded.
You probably know what a "clean" electric guitar sounds like. That is the sound that an electric guitar makes when plugged straight into an amplifier without using any guitar or amplifier effects. (An consequent is simply whatever that modifies the guitar's sound). This could be thought about the "normal" electric guitar sound. An acoustic guitar that you play without an amp also has a clean sound.
So what makes a clean guitar sound like a freight train, or a buzz saw, or a screaming banshee? That would be guitar distortion. When you do something to a clean guitar to make it sound "dirty", we call that distortion.
Distortion can be fulfilled, in two dissimilar ways:
1) Most guitar amplifiers have a distortion channel (sometimes called overdrive) that will give it that dirty sound. You can adjust the number of distortion to furnish the exact sound you are trying to achieve.
2) someone else way to accomplish distortion is through the use of a standalone distortion pedal. A distortion pedal is a dinky box with a button on it that you press to give a guitar that dirty distorted sound. There are knobs to adjust the number of distortion just like on an amplifier with a distortion channel.
Why would you want to use distortion on electric guitars? Because it sounds awesome! There is something about distortion on electric guitars that has to be heard to be absolutely understood. Sure the sound is "distorted" from what a general clean guitar would sound like, but this does not mean that the sound is bad or undesirable. It just means that it sounds like something fully dissimilar from a clean guitar sound.
Guitar distortion is coarse in much of today's favorite music no matter what kind of music you listen to. From rock and roll to grunge to jazz to country/western, odds are you like or have heard a song with distortion on the guitar. Here are a few of my favorites:
"The Trooper" by Iron Maiden 1983
"The Spirit of Radio" by Rush 1980
"Eruption" by Van Halen 1978
"Purple Haze" by Jimi Hendrix 1967
"Foreplay/Longtime" by Boston 1977
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