How Guitar Pedals Create Harmonic Distortion?
What are overdrive and distortion pedals actually doing to a signal? In this video, I use a Boss SD-1, my Phase Two Music Radical Distortion, and a real-time harmonic display to show how a clean sine wave changes as distortion is added. We’ll look at waveform shape, individual harmonics, Total Harmonic Distortion, Drive settings, and why two pedals with nearly the same THD can still sound different.
The measurements are made with a QuantAsylum QA403 audio analyzer connected to custom Python software I developed for real-time visualization of the pedal input, output, waveform, and harmonic content.