Originally Posted By: Gordon Scott

This is a great discussion, thanks go to all that are participating.

You're not wrong to distinguish between them, but they're far closer related than perhaps you realise. The sound you get from plucking a string contains many harmonics. They're caused in part by the fact of the pluck being a non-linear stimulation that results in predominantly even-order harmonics that tend to sound pleasant to us. There are also sympathetic vibrations in other strings and in the body of the instrument. All those sounds also tend to decay at different rates. So far we're agreed, I think, though I would argue that the very fact of that pluck is strictly a distortion.

I think we are mainly in agreement here. I'll amplify your point a bit. Any instrument made of wood, glue, metalics and plastics is going to produce a complex sound map made up of compound and overlapping waveforms. My bass has an alder body and a rosewood fingerboard. These and other design details made by the manufacturer shape the complex tones that are produced and these are desired; it's what a bass guitar is. And the type of pickups and strings shape the overall tone much further. Personally, I prefer flatwounds.

Edit: A point where we may not completly align is "the pluck is strictly a distortion". From an engineering perspective, the plucking is the mechanical input to the system and the distortion is an output. If the input is in the form of a single pluck then it could be described (mathematically or in other ways) as a step function or a transient impulse/pulse and the system would ring out (or respond) and eventually decay. If the plucking is repetitive such as a sequence of 1/4, 8th or 16th notes then this input can be described as a forcing function with much different characteristics in it's response output. Both cases can contain distortion in the output. Of course inputs such as plucking with a finger, sliding or plucking with a pick will, in general, produce different system responses. Note, I didn't read this per se anywhere. Rather, the bass guitar and it's associated amplifier is an electro-mechanical-acoustic system which will be governed and described by systems theory.


In "another life" my peers considered me an SME (subject-matter-expert) in a few technical areas. One area is applied vibration. Terms for me that were as common as "hello" and "the" were transmissibility functions, Q, fn1, fn2, fn3, natural and applied damping treatments, tri-axial accelerometers, modal analysis, transient response, vibration isolators, single amplitude displacement, Power-Spectral-Density curves, FFT, compound spring-mass-damper systems, MIL-STD-810, S-N diagrams and mathematical modelling of the above. The list goes on and on.

One of my all-time favorite projects involved flying in a Boeing 737 test aircraft doing rollercoasters at 35,000 feet over the Pacific Ocean for the purpose of acquiring thermal, shock and vibration data on and around a flight-critical engine component we had design authority for. So I'm fortunate to bring an engineering background to my journey of music study even if, as the years go by, I'm forgetting more and more of what I once knew . . . happens to us all if we live long enough.

I think we'd also agree that clipping is a distortion and can be quite unwanted. Absolutely.

Where you perhaps don't agree is that, for example, a valve amplifier, even when well below the clipping level will introduce other sounds that are not a part of the basic sound of the instrument.
This I have no experience in. I don't think my Fender amp has "valve amplification", but I don't know for sure.

What I'm saying, then, is don't fear all of those colourations. Even with a subjectively nice clean sound, there will be some present.Agreed. The distortion (not coloration) that I prefer to remove in some recordings is that gritty, dirty sound that you don't hear on the Rain On Me track.

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For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.