The ubiquity of guitar effects to sound processing

Ever since the electric guitar was invented the musicians that played it wanted to change or enhance its sound, maybe the tone was just too clean and innocuous. Les Paul experimented with tape effects to create his wonderful multi-tracking and delays, and the early Rock n’ Roll pioneers, such as Johnny Burnette and Link Wray, hacked their amplification equipment to grind more sound from it. The first guitar pedals came with the DeArmond Tremolo in 1946, as used by Bo Diddley, then followed by the Gibson Fuzztone in 1962, as unleashed by Keith Richards on ‘Satisfaction’. The original advert for the fuzztone sold it like it was a synthesizer, a tone genie for the electric guitar. It was claimed by Gibson that it could do organ-like tones, mellow woodwinds, whispering reeds, booming brass, and bell-clear horns. Even then the idea of the effects chain was understood as they suggested adding it with reverb and tremolo. Fifty year and more later, guitar effects are more popular than ever. They are available in hardware, in software, and as software running on digital hardware…. They are made with valves, germanium transistors, silicon transistors, discrete components, Integrated circuits, DSPs, FPGAs… They certainly could be labelled as ubiquitous and they have reflected all the advances in technology over the decades. The influence has stretched beyond the guitar into other instruments: the wah-wah pedal on the Rhodes pianos, the distortion pedals used with the TB-303, the phasers used on Jean Michel’s Jarre’s string synthesizer… Modern music would not be where it is without them. However, although they are associated with music that is sometimes wild and rebellious, or dreaming and ambient, there is an awful lot they can teach us about signal processing if we look inside to grasp how they do what they do. Waveshaping, filters, modulation, nonlinearities are all terms that could have come from a communications textbook but also belong to the realm of guitar effects. They can teach us so much about the application and consequences of signal theory. Curiously, the academic perspective only gradually emerged, firstly with papers in the Audio Engineering society, and then later with the international community of Digital Audio Effects. However, the field has not been compromised by either the academics or the corporations and there is a healthy tribe of boutique pedal makers, and software coders currently developing their own ideas into effects and finding devotees across the internet. Therefore, a ubiquitous community with a beating heart exists. This talk will take a short journey through this world, to remind us of so much that has been achieved, how it impacted the music we love, and how the broad cohort of musicians and technologists trade challenges to their inventiveness to make great music and even greater sounds