What makes overdrive, distortion and fuzz pedals different?

PEDALS
(Image credit: Future)

Reverb's Joe Shadid invites Daredevil Pedals' Johnny Wator to break down the anatomy of dirt pedals in this new video, and it helps explains the key factors that give individual overdrive, fuzz, boost and distortion pedals their characteristics. 

Wator explains terms like hard clipping, tone stack and variable resistor actually mean for your tone, with pedal examples. It's an accessible guide from a designer's perspective that could be useful to anyone who would like to get into designing or modding their own effects pedals

Rob Laing
Guitars Editor, MusicRadar

I'm the Guitars Editor for MusicRadar, handling news, reviews, features, tuition, advice for the strings side of the site and everything in between. Before MusicRadar I worked on guitar magazines for 15 years, including Editor of Total Guitar in the UK. When I'm not rejigging pedalboards I'm usually thinking about rejigging pedalboards.