Amplifiers and effect pedals are essential elements of guitar music, just like the guitar itself, so I believe they are indispensable topics on this site.
However, I don’t handle them at a professional level like the guitar. In the first place, my main goal was to understand how amplifiers and pedals function, what kind of influence they have on the original tone of the guitar, and what kind of impact they have on the playability of the guitar as a whole.
When I first started playing the electric guitar in the late 1960s, there were no readily available amps that could produce distortion.
The concept of a master volume was still a long way off. In my country at that time (probably in other countries as well), amps were considered essential for producing clean tones without distortion. Perhaps there was no such thing as a guitar amp as an instrument, but rather it was seen as a hi-fi device. Furthermore, imported products were scarce and expensive, so there was no option of finding old Deluxe Reverb or Princeton Reverb amps at pawn shops.
However, the music I listened to on records at the time was mostly filled with distorted and crunch tones, especially long sustain tones were important for solos. But I had no idea how to create that rich overdrive sound. I remember someone saying that the black switch on the cover of the album “Super Session,” featuring Mike Bloomfield, was the secret to his tone. Of course, this turned out to be misinformation, and later I learned that the switch was the pickup selector.
Eventually, I purchased a fuzz pedal called FM-2 Fuzz Master manufactured by Ace Tone (predecessor of Roland, founded by Mr. Ikutaro Kakehashi). Although this pedal fulfilled my expectations in terms of sustain, the sound was sawtooth-like with a lot of odd harmonics, making it unsuitable for playing chords. While I got closer to Jimi Hendrix’s tone to some extent, unfortunately, I couldn’t achieve the smooth, singing British-style sustain that I wanted.
Since the first distortion pedal didn’t quite satisfy me, I embarked on a journey of exploration in search of “that” sound (as mentioned earlier, at that time, amps with master volume controls were not common). I tried various approaches, such as disassembling cassette tape recorders and using them as preamps by force. During that time, a brand called Roland emerged, and they released their first pedal called the AS-1. It was named Sustainer, so I was full of expectations and immediately bought it. However, it turned out to be a compressor, not the overdrive I was looking for, so I gave it to the other guitarist in my band. This pedal has also become a vintage item today.