Guitar Pedals Strengthen The Rock And Roll Sound

Rock and roll owes its soul to the electric guitar. Yes, there are other instruments that make up the rock and roll sound but the foundation lies in the sound of the guitar. Movies like "Wayne's World" and "Bill and Ted's Adventures" paid a somewhat irreverent homage to the music genre and lifestyle. Both movies put the guitar in the forefront of the movies. The unmistakable hot licks of Chuck Berry's Gibson 335 to Metallica's shredding wall of sound, the guitar has defined them both.
The unsung heroes of the rock and roll world that give each band and guitarist a unique but unmistakable rock sound are the guitar pedals. These tools produce the sounds that define rock and roll. These technical wonders have not only defined the guitar sound that is rock and roll but the artists themselves. Pedals have also created subcategories of rock and roll. These sonic wonder machines have always gone unnoticed while simultaneously defining the guitar.
The rockabilly sound was defined by overdriven amps and bulky echo machines that gave Scotty Moore and Luther Perkins the pioneering sound of the rock and roll guitar. Today the music and the sound lives on through more mobile units of delay and echo found in stomp boxes small enough to put in your pocket. The earlier models of echo machines were so large that many were kept outside of the studio. Now the same sound put together in the genesis of rock and roll can be put inside a compartment of a guitar case along with others and the guitar.
That overdriven sound was present in the early rockabilly manifestations of rock and roll. Tube screamer and overdrive pedals allow modern solid state amplifiers that same sound. That broken up sound became the archetype sound of rock and roll. The sixties and seventies saw the morphing of this sound from fuzz to full blown distortion. Great Rock anthems of all sorts were defined by these types of sounds and guitar pedals. "Smoke on the Water," Canned Heat's "Spirit in the Sky" and "Voodoo Child" all put the crunch in rock.
Jimi Herndrix turned the sonic world of rock and roll upside down. His use of these sonic manipulators found at his heel and toe redefined the guitar, the music, and the boundaries that were permissible to explore as a guitarist. The "wah" and fuzz took the rock guitar into new realms of expression and opened the door to other sonic possibilities.
Players like Jeff Beck, David Gilmour and Zack Wilde have all taken the rock guitar to different places, yet all are defined as rock. They have also developed and used guitar pedals that allowed them to create these exciting locales within the sanctum of rock and roll. The guitar is the lord of rock and its foot soldiers are the pedals making for a