Metadata
- Author: Perfect Circuit
- Full Title:: Overdrive vs. Distortion vs. Fuzz: What’s the Difference?
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://www.perfectcircuit.com/signal/overdrive-distortion-fuzz-pedals?srsltid=AfmBOoo2NWbDRZmBYJCvBuKHQPfLc-EFdKCGZlDbo2DjrUtpGUIXT58Q
- Read date:: 2025-11-11
Highlights
Overdrive, distortion, and fuzz all work by introducing clipping to the waveform of the signal. (View Highlight)
But they each do it in different ways, and to different extremes. Clipping can occur at many points in the signal chain (View Highlight)
Soft clipping is more gentle and subtle and usually found in overdrives. Hard clipping, like you get from distortion pedals, isn’t so gentle. And fuzz is the most extreme of all of them. (View Highlight)
fuzz effects provide can vary, but often they clip signals so intensely that the could basically turn sine wave signals into a square wave. (View Highlight)
There are different ways to use them, and a lot of players use an overdrive pedal to push the input of a tube amp that’s already breaking up, rather than relying on a pedal alone to do all the tone-shaping work. (View Highlight)
A lot of circuits also come with their own EQ profiles. Take the godfather of overdrives, Ibanez Tube Screamer. Its pleasant midrange boost and low end rolloff are a great complement to other tone factors like single coil pickups. Most overdrive pedals offer at least three controls, normally input gain, tone/EQ, and output volume. Some offer more EQ points, but the 3-knob model is the most common. (View Highlight)
Due to more available gain, distortion pedals are normally used on a clean amp channel. And due to the more significant clipping, some playing and picking articulation is usually lost in translation. (View Highlight)
By design, fuzz pedals are intended to sound like something going wrong in the signal chain, like a busted console or torn speaker. Because of this a lot of them are…quirky. (View Highlight)
Certain fuzz pedals like the Dunlop Fuzz Face like to be the first in the signal chain, before any buffers. (View Highlight)