How Clean vs. Overdrive/Distortion affects technique

Playing Technique
#1

Hello
2 things I wanted to cover in this post

  1. What have you encountered in practicing these exercises using a clean tone vs. an overdrive or distorted tone? I’ve been practicing clean so I can hear the articulation (and screw-ups) clearly. However, clean is not as responsive or loud as distorted, so it seems like you have to pick harder to hear the notes. Even at louder volumes, the note’s attack is much different through the amplifier. This makes it more challenging for me to increase speed and get closer to “shred zone” tempos. I don’t necessarily want to switch to my dirty channel because I might not hear the mistakes or sloppiness when it happens. (at least not as well)

  2. Does Troy have examples of him playing these blistering sequences with a clean tone? If not… Troy, would you be interested in posting some?

Cheers

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#2

I always used to practice with distortion, but when I turned it off for a while, I noticed that barely any notes were articulated properly. I’ve been practicing with a really clean tone (and the bridge pickup) for a while and it’s a lot harder, but finally I’m seeing progress.

On the other hand, distortion forces you to mute properly, so doing both is probably optimal.

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#3

I agree, clean and distorted are almost two different instruments!

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#4

You’ve absolutely got to do both, but also it’s worth working on dialing in a tone that gets the level of saturation/harmonics/whatever you want without excessive gain so you can get as close to the not-worrying-too-much-about-muting you get with a clean tone.

I know I’m saying this like I’ve got it down but this is probably one of the main things I’m working on at the moment. I generally like my amp/s set to a really fat juicy clean tone* with masses of headroom and then to stack overdrive pedals each with only a little bit of gain (I do clean boost into SD-1 into Green Rhino, any TS will no doubt do the trick), I feel like this gets you a sort of “smooth saturation” kind of situation without a lot of ‘hair’ to the tone. Add a lexicon circular delay and that’s hours of fun.

I suppose another point is that it’s good to practise with an unforgiving tone to work on your precision and so on, but if you ALWAYS play with an unforgiving tone it’s easy to get frustrated, so let yourself rip every now and then with a tone that’s easy to play.

*And I like my clean tones CLEAN, none of this ‘just on the edge of breakup’ thing.

#5

As others have said, two different instruments, and definitely useful to practice both.

  1. Practicing with high gain will teach you noise / muting control, and pick attack tone. When clean electric or acoustic players pick up a high gain electric, it can be a wall of noise if they haven’t figured out how directly touch the strings to stop the open string ringing. And also, a high gain tone can sound pretty ugly and scratchy if you haven’t figured out how to play with edge picking, and to modulate that amount as necessary.

  2. Clean tone practice is how you learn if you’re really picking the notes you think you are. And second, it’s how you learn dynamics. With a clean tone, and no compressor, softly picked notes and/or missed/hammered notes are often barely audible. If a metal / rock player hasn’t done clean tone practice, it’s obvious because as soon as they click off the distortion pedal, half the notes disappear. It’s not about hitting the notes harder. It’s about hitting them all evenly. And then, learning to bring dynamics back so you can have accents where you want them.

Do both!

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#6

One strategy I use is I practice with an amp sim and record the di. When I’m done with the exercise, I go back and listen to the recorded DI. It really puts things in perspective and helps me understand what is translating and what is not. If you have an amp sim and a DAW like Reaper, you can start to implement this in your practice. I hope that helps anyone! :grinning:

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#7

I practice with distortion because I love the sound and I love pinch harmonics (still very inconsistent with those :grin:). After 22:00 I practice with an unplugged guitar because my neighbors are dicks. I guess that’s my clean sound :smiley: