The sleazy 1970s guitar sound

Above is the song What Year Is This?, which you can get on Bandcamp if you want it. It was an experiment with a specific type of tone shaping to see if it would work or not. Did it?

Yes, it did.

The guitar used was the Jazzmaster, but the experimental part was simply this: How little overdrive could I get away with?

Like many guitar players, I used to be one that used way too much distortion/overdrive. It's just a thing you do when you don't know any better. This of course was before I discovered compression.

For this song however, I decided to turn down the overdrive as much as I could, then after that recorded a second guitar playing the mostly-same riff on another track, then panned each guitar track away from each other and see how it would turn out. The end result was actually pretty good.

The doubling-up of guitars on two separate tracks really brings a nice fullness to the overall recorded sound, so even with just a very small amount of overdrive, things sound "big."

Although the intent wasn't to sound like 1970s sleaze guitar at first, that's what it ended up being. I was okay with that. 🙂