Here is an infographic courtesy of Songsimian.com detailing the history of guitar effects, starting all the way back to the 1930s with Rickenbacker’s Vibrola Spanish Guitar and progressing to the present day. Along the way, we see iconic guitar-effect breakthroughs like gain and reverb in the 1940s to 1950s’ effects like fuzz (discovered by accidentally dropping a Fender Bass amp on a rainy street) and distortion (the fortuitous discovery when Link Wray stabbed a hole in his amp’s speaker).
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