Distortion and the guitar go together like peanut butter and jelly, but did you ever wonder how the combination came about? Believe it or not, the sound that everyone loves was a product of a country music session in Nashville in 1960.
According to
an article in The Tennessean by
Peter Cooper, the first recorded distorted guitar came about as an accident when the 3 channel console malfunctioned during a
Marty Robbins session for the song "
Don't Worry." According to the engineer of the session,
Glen Snoddy, the transformer on one of the console's mic preamps failed, causing it to distort, but everyone loved the sound.
The song went on to be #1 on the country charts and #3 on the pop charts and suddenly everyone was coming to the studio (
Owen Bradley's famous
Quonset Hut Studio) looking to replicate the sound. The only problem was that the channel with the lovely distortion had by that time failed completely, which caused Snoddy to hastily build a pedal that replicated the sound.
Now keep in mind that this was the very first guitar pedal!
Snoddy then offered the pedal to
Gibson, who issued it as the
Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone in 1962. The problem was that it didn't catch on. In fact, it was only when
The Stones' Keith Richards used the pedal on the world-wide hit "
Satisfaction" that the world finally appreciated the wonders of the distortion pedal, and sales took off.
Snoddy collected royalties for 7 years on his creation, but continued to engineer and recorded hits for
Loretta Lynn, Jimmy Buffett, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and
Johnny Cash ("
Ring of Fire"). He's 91 and retired now, but hopefully people will remember him as the architect of the modern distorted guitar and the guitar pedal.
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