vintage vs modern overdrive | gain appreciation

overdrive for all ages…

Occasionally some unusual pedals cross my desk, these Ex-Gear overdrive boxes are a prime example of unconventional design with their sloped enclosures, illuminated knobs, and magnetic base plates!

Despite some weirder features, their sounds represent something we should all be familiar with: Overdrives from different eras of guitar gear.

Grittman dishes out a gritty, spitty vintage drive while Krush craves out a sleeker, tighter ‘modern’ distortion.

‘vintage’ overdrive

Vintage drive sounds can be catagorised as having a more open, looser and more gritty overdrive texture.
The amplifiers (on which pedals like Grittman are based) were fairly straightforward by today’s standards: simple, point to point wired circuits with very little in the signal path to sculpt the tone.
Drive was generated by turning them loud enough to force the signal into self destruction and valve rectifiers meant that hitting hard caused the low end to blow out and become undefined.

This results in an overdrive that is untamed, with lots of frequencies being amplified, and very little control over the general structure of that distortion. It’s big, gritty, and requires the guitarist to control the sound with their playing.

As with the sound samples in the video above, this sound works incredibly well with single coil pickups allowing for a lot of control and variation. Hotter humbuckers however cause the distortion to lose a lot of definition which may be undesirable.

‘modern’ overdrive

Krush represents a more modern style of overdrive which may remind one of the way amplifiers sounded around the early 2000s.

In contrast to the Vintage sound, these ‘Modern’ Overdrives have a tight, tailored sound and smoother texture to the distortion.

With advancements in electronics amplifiers and effects at the turn of the millennium were able to sculpt the distortion character into something far more precise. By throwing out a lot of frequencies we don’t want to amplify and putting emphasis on the ones we do, Modern drives can cut far better by narrowing the sonic field.

Solid state rectification prevented amplifiers from the loose sag, significantly tightening the low end response and having the distortion deliberately crafted in a cascading preamp meant the power amp was free to amplify cleanly, retaining the smoothness and clarity older amps lacked.

Krush captures this much more controlled sound which produces a much thinner, brighter drive when used with single coils, but has exactly the kind of tightness required to get an articulate aggressive response from high output humbucker.