I am confused, and don't want to be. So I'll bet I'm in the right place to get some of these questions answered that have perplexed me forever:

1) What is the difference between Distortion and Overdrive (aren't they the same thing)?

2) Which one is the Ibanez Tubescreamer?

3) What is the difference (besides price) between the TS9 and the TS808?

4) When a tube amp is breaking up, is that Distortion...or...Overdrive?

5) I heard that you should pair pedals as follows, is this true?:
a) OverDrive pedals on Tube amps
b) Distortion pedals on Solid State amps

Thanks for the education!!

regarding the tubescreamer, everything you need to know can be found here:

http://www.analogman.com/tshist.htm

Distortion is squarewaved, giving a harsh rasping sound.
Overdrive is more like a sinewave, nicely rounded.

Use either with whatever amp you like, no rules. I'm well off both types of gain and just use the mother of all fuzz sounds now.

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Niki I don't own an overdrive pedal.. What would you reccomend with a Blues Deuluxe or a Deluxe Reverb...

An oldster way of putting it is that back when, pushing tubes hard tends to clip the signal peaks. The signal itself and the harmonics still remain mostly sine ("rounded") waves and so they sound musical.

Distortion as we use it came in with solid state amps. The early ones tended to produce square waves, which sound very raspy. Also, the harmonics were non-musical for an overall unpleasant sort of sound. But that's the sound that became associated with early metal.

In reality both are distorted signals but they've come to be associated with different kinds of music. I use a TS808 because it resembles pushing my old Bassman 50 very hard on lead solos. It creates a more or less general warmish sounding distortion.

To my ear, the TS9 comes closer to the harder distortion I might associate with metal and beyond. I play old stuff and only want to warm up and boost solos a tad, hence my choice of the 808.

I'd say that a lot of the modern sound I hear falls into what I'd call distortion based on my working definition. As to whether one works better with tubes or solid state -- today it's probably a case of take your pick. Solid state amps today have come light years from the late 60s models in getting a musical sound out of the amp.

I personaly swear by the digitech bad monkey. Its similar to a tubescreamer in the way it operates and its sound. It has far more scope for sounds with its high and low controls. It will also act as a treble/clean boost with the gain on minimum.
All for around £40/$50
Bad Monkey at Guitar Center link
Blackstar make a great overdrive
Blackstar OD link
Though it costs significantly more.

And of course theres the old faithfull Boss
Boss OD link

Of all of them I think the Bad Monkey is the best value for money and ideal for enhancing the sound of the amps gain. It's never going to give you metalica melting dual rectifier sound, it's a little tame as a standalone gain unit. You won't do well with it as your only source of drive. It's great for taking a valve amp from clean to 60's britblues kind of tone though. Though I use highgain amps live I only ever have them set to clean. I just dont look anywhere else for overdrive sounds. You can chase huge costing pedals for years and find they are ultimately junk and that you were better off with the wonky thing you picked up for £20 years ago.

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What other source would you need to do well...

Thanks,

Cajun..

Amp gain. You can set the gain on a single channel amp quite low (so that a strat on 8 will be clean) and use the badmonkey to take you firmly into lead guitar territory. It does this by boosting the guitar signal more than by adding drive, so you get a nice clear sound based on your amps sound.

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Good question. I'm probably wrong, but always thought that it was more of a connotation than a clear division. I always associated OD with a mild distortion i.e. a blusey sound and at the other end of the spectrum heavy distortion such as found in metal. There's lots of area between and where one begins and the other ends.....who knows? As far as the shape of the wave, again I thought that the degree of OD/Distortion was what 'reshaped' the wave.

I like the Tubescreamer TS-9. It has lots of variability and if you want heavy distortion, I would use it on the 'Drive' channel of a 2 chnl. amp with the Drive set at a modest level. Together they give substantion distortion. One of the previous posters was suggesting this same thing, I believe.

I can't speak on the other TS models such as the 808 and the turbo, but when in the market, the reviews I read often said there was little enough difference to justiy the increased cost. If I wanted to experiment, I'd probably try the Keeley mod TS-9. The TS-9 is probably the best selling OD pedal around.

There's my 2 cents for what it's worth (2 cents)

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The quintessential sound of 60/70's R&R:
Fender Tube Amps
Gibson Guitars

I bought a tubescreamer from analogman and he modded it so it's now a TS-9/808 all in one pedal. Here is a link to that mod.
http://www.analogman.com/ts9silv.htm

Overdrive is sine (curvy) wave sound that happens when the tubes in an amp are pushed hard and the signal clips. Most people think it's a warmer, growlier sound than distortion.

Distortion is a square sound wave created with solid state circuitry (because Solid State amps don't naturually overdrive . . no tubes). Most people think it's a crunchier and harsher sound than OD.

I use both depending on the application.

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"Life is like eating jalapenos. What you do today may burn your arse tomorrow"

After thinking about this some more, I'm thinking that the term Overdrive originally was describing what occurred to the device (i.e. power tube, speaker) and meant that there was more power being delivered to it than it could use to produce a clean signal. The term distortion was then applied to describe the resultant sound/signal from being overdriven.

Over time, OD has become associated with lower levels of distortion, but I really don't think that they are two different things. What does Wikipedia say?

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The quintessential sound of 60/70's R&R:
Fender Tube Amps
Gibson Guitars

Here's what Wikipedia says: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overdrive_(music)

Seems to me the two terms are used often interchangebly. What do you think?

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The quintessential sound of 60/70's R&R:
Fender Tube Amps
Gibson Guitars

It's all clipping to a sound engineer, whether it be fuzz, OD, or DIST gain. They are very different things though and respond to playing differently. Fuzz and OD seem to compress everything and really even out a sound. Distortion on the other hand seems to accentuate whatever frequency its focus'd on.

As MThorn said all have their applications.

For the record most amp OD is pre amp tubes and diode clipping these days.

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nikininja wrote:

[quote]You can set the gain on a single channel amp quite low (so that a strat on 8 will be clean) and use the badmonkey to take you firmly into lead guitar territory. It does this by boosting the guitar signal more than by adding drive, so you get a nice clear sound based on your amps sound.
[quote]

Sounds like the badmonkey doesn't colour the tone at all. That's great. How about the dynamic sensitivity (sag) of the amp? It’s hard to explain it, but when using my Boss SD1 the attack on the strings do not translate to the amp the same as without the pedal. The SD1 does colour the sound a bit, but the string attack thing is really bringing me down.