"There is nothing more satisfying than directing the flow of water." – David Lynch

You'd have to go back a lot further, or go forward a great deal?, depending on yr direction, as to analogies for "gain" – the really very few designs that became the basis for most others were, to some degree, either based on or outright taken from the amplifiers in radio receivers. And this sounds like legend-making bullshit, but it's true: at their very core, a lot of the basic differences between early Fenders and early Voxes – and there were others, but most were either imitators OR cool alternate designs, into which the designers had put 0% consideration of mass production, stability, materials procurement, distribution networks, how precisely they were gonna get 50,000 6SL7 tubes when McDonnell Douglas stopped building airplanes that needed 70% of a 12AX7's µ (mu, gain multiplication factor) – Well a lot of that came from 2 sides of one thing: • When the United States "entered" World War II, Clarence Leonidas "Leo" Fender was 32, had one working ear AND one existing eye, was kinda fat, and was involved in electronics work that you could plausibly say were necessary on the home front • When the UK entered World War II, Dick Denney was 18 years old, a sickly thin fellow all his life, and there is some weird fucking symmetry going on: he was exempted from fisticuff-style service due to a partially missing lung, after a tuberculosis surgery, AND he could only hear through one ear, as the other one had suffered one of my least favorite pairs of words in English, a "perforated eardrum." BUT, young Dick was already known as something as an electronics whiz, which meant "radio" back then – and His Majesty's Government had just banned all civilian radio traffic during the war, save a very very few broadcasts that might've had the explicit permission and foreknowledge of the Government and, more importantly, the bloody well bloody military. So what, then, is a skinny sick one-eared radio genius to do? Well in the UK, because it used to have the functional infrastructure of a nation, they said, "I'll tell you bloody what, Dicky old boy, we all know you're positively dreamy with the radiophone, and we'll be needing a fair bloody lot of radio during this war! So, because we're sort of a real country, our major arms manufacturer Vickers – put them on a par with, say, Lockheed and Raytheon for the yanks – essentially reverts to partial and immediate State control when we need to keep from getting killed, and so indeed has it just done, what with those bloody Jerries doing, it seems, the only bloody thing they know HOW to do. A savage people. "So, the Government is bossing Vickers, yes?, and the government wants new and bigger and better radios than the world has ever seen, hm?, and here we are in your factual birthplace of Erith, Kent [I don't know if he still lived there], and Vickers HQ is hardly a jog away, 18 miles, in Croydon! And we think so bloody well of you, we really do, that you'll be Top Radio Lad, even at merely 18 years, and with half as many ears as average." SO: Leo Fender spent those years working on commercial amplification technology as it existed in America, derived mostly from radios and phonographs, but for the purposes of building early PA and sound-reinforcement systems for big bands; Dick Denney was working with whatever This Island England could get during the Blitz, trying to design amplifiers for radio communications, and with a VERY different set of prerogatives: SIMPLE. AUDIBLE. RUGGED. EASY TO FIX. You may not engage in the circuit fantasia of your teenage reveries. We need circuits that HIT YOU RIGHT IN THE FUCKING EAR, that REQUIRE AS FEW COMPONENTS AS POSSIBLE, that CAN BE FIXED BY ANYONE WITH A RUDIMENTARY GRASP OF ELECTRONICS, and that WILL NOT NEED FIXING, BECAUSE THEY DON'T BLOODY BREAK. Clear, sharp, simple, unkillable. And meanwhile Leo's thinking in terms like "round," "sparkle," "brassy," "punch," and he can dick around with extended circuitry as much as he likes, because HE's gonna fix it if it breaks. So: what makes a swing band sound good in California vs. what will cut through the sonic apocalypse of a war and not break. Fender vs. Vox. And the War ends, and electric music gets popular, and suddenly, we're in Dreamtime, looking for the footprints of the sounds we dreamt as children.

I'll go into greater depth, but almost every tube amp is INTENDED to produce asymmetric clipping. It could be an artifact of bad biasing, sure, but it's also happening on purpose at every gain stage – a common triode tube gain stage is "inverting," meaning the +/- peaks of the voltage waveform get flipped at each stage, so they're going to clip asymmetrically by definition. Neither symmetrical nor asymmetrical clipping is "right" or "wrong," they all have their uses, but asymmetrical tends to be more "amp-like," and symmetrical "sounds like a pedal." I can get into the evolution of this, but basically, very few drive of the classic drive pedals actually achieve distortion like an amp does: an amp is running gain stage into gain stage until it starts saturating the tubes, hitting their max output. Some fuzzes work that way, but the vast majority of famous "gain" pedals have little to not "gain" at all; they're trying to replicate that effect by using diodes to chop off the signal waveform at a certain point. And because diodes are MUCH more precise within this domain (instead of "gain," they have what's called "forward voltage," the maximum voltage they'll allow to pass through), pedal distortion could be MUCH more precisely tuned using symmetrical diodes. That's where you get the whole "too predictable for an amp" effect. And there are TONS of different diodes, so you can mix them up – plus, you CAN use diodes for asymmetrical clipping, but the famous examples don't. E.g., a Tube Screamer is what's called a symmetrical soft-clipper: it uses an op amp (basically a solid-state amplifier in a tiny little chip) to make the signal bigger, and then it uses 2 diodes that clip each lobe of the signal, exactly the same. "Soft," here, means that the clippers are inside the feedback loop around the op amp itself, so you're always getting clean signal >> op amp signal boost >> symmetrical clipping >> loop back around to the input, but with slight clipping >> repeat, so the clipping is extremely predictable. Whereas the Boss SD-1, which has caught my ear lately, is basically the same circuit as a Tube Screamer, except it clips the waveform ASYMMETRICALLY, meaning it's a little more "open," harder-edged, and has a more complex harmonic blend to the distortion. Whereas, for symmetrical HARD clipping, the legend is the ProCo Rat: it also amplifies the input with an op amp, but there's no feedback loop, the louder signal goes forward, and then each lobe is hard-clipped by two identical diodes. (This is often called a "back-to-back" arrangement, because the 2 diodes clipping the signal and dumping off the clipped part are right next to each other, facing the opposite directions, since they're clipping different halves.) You could make any of these designs sound insane OR very tame, depending on what you want out of them. Younger jazz guitarists who aren't terrified of pedals and overdrive have really picked up on the Rat, because it's got enough distortion & compression to sustain at low settings, AND it can be set very dark, AND the symmetrical clipping is still smooth enough not to sound out of place. If you go listen to the first track off Chick Corea's self-titled album with his band The Vigil (the only one, sadly), the guitar tone on that – and most of the album – is some hollow or semihollow guitar, ES-335 or whatever, into a clean Fender amp, but with a Rat between them for the lead melodies and solos, set very smooth and dark.

I was in the middle of an exhaustively informative reply when Chrome crashed. Lemme see how far I can condense this: People making early pedals had no idea what they were doing and largely considered it in a novel industry, and they were shocked when it stuck around and made shitloads of money. So pedals, up through and even past the 1990s "boutique"/DIY pedal boom, stuck all kinds of weird shit in their circuits as quick, easy fixes for mechanical problems, and no regard for the sound of the thing. Some of those quick fixes, iike the preamp on a CE-1, fuckin' rule; some of them, like the op-amp preamp on the types of Memory Man that have an "Input" control (all MMs have the preamp, but not all have the control), can be awesome, neutral, or problems, depending on the context; and some of them honk a load of donkalickin' dick, until somebody makes the bad sound cool, and then everyone wants it. You may know, for example, that the very first pedal (apart from like "Reverb on/off" amp switches), the Maestro FZ-1, came from the sound off a fucked-up mic preamp in the console being used to record "Don't Worry" by Marty Robbins, the mic pre for the bass guitar – as I recall, the transistor in the mic pre got really hot for some reason and was overbiased To the Gods. Credit to Marty's corny ass for leaving it on the song, and credit to one of history most unjustly awful-name guys, Glenn Snoddy, who was the engineer on the session and thought, "That was sick. I'm gonna take this broken preamp home, but before I fix it, I'm gonna do a circuit schem for the way it's broken, and then I can make more." And thus he did, and thence was born the first pedal, the Maestro FZ-1 fuzz, which sounds like dog ass. It's really awful. Pedal-fetish guys will blow loads over ANYTHING rare or important enough, but even they will tell you the FZ-1 is terrible. Luckily, Maestro was in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where Gibson was when it was really Gibson, and the 2 endeavors had friendly rapport, so Maestro got Gibson to send some FZ-1s to famous people, hoping SOMEBODY would use it. And somebody did, though not the way Maestro wanted: there was a posh British lad, of notable lineage, named Michael P. Jagger, who was studying at the London School of Economics, but made the financially astute decision to discontinue his studies, for he believed that the long-term profit potential of the British "beat combo" was orders of magnitude larger than consensus held. So he started making people call him "Mick," and he formed such a beat combo, "The Rolling Stones" as I recall. One day, these Rolling Stones, having already grown rather profitable, were working on a song called "Satisfaction," and Keith Richards wanted a horn section and had the horn riff in his head – originally it was a straight Otis Redding ripoff, so they were likely gratified when Otis himself covered the song, but I prefer to belief that Otis made the intentional decision to learn none of the words and not even have his band play the riff right; his version is hilarious – but, alas, it was rather late in the day for English session musicians of 1965. (Unless you've done all this shit yourself, you'll have to trust me that "too late in the day for session musicians" is a fucking hilarious concept.) Keith, however, was one of the guitarists that the desperate Maestro convinced Gibson to send an FZ-1 fuzz. He, like everyone else, thought it sounded like dog ass – but he also needed a way to remember the horn riff he had in mind, and a fuzz can kiiiinda sound like horns?, so he did a demo track for the horn part, using the FZ-1. Nobody involved in any of this was planning to keep the fuzz track. Keith already had guitar parts to play, and it was such a toss-off demo that if you listen to "Satisfaction" on good headphones, you can hear Keith clicking the FZ-1 on and off with his foot, because who gives a shit. ... And then they came back the next day, and they all kind of liked this ugly shitty thing, and it you certainly couldn't call it an outright Otis Redding ripoff ... so what the fuck. Plus, one of the FZ-1's signature awful aspects is that it has no low frequencies, but in a mix with a whole band, you don't really NEED those for a part that was supposed to be a brassy, cutting horn section, so in the mix, you couldn't tell how horrible the FZ-1 sounded on its own. Leave it on the track, maybe do a limited-release acetate, and if everyone hates it, we get the real horns, right? Everybody loved it. They loved it so much, in fact, that it created the pedal industry. They loved it so much that I get to mention one of my favorite screwy scabby little figures in ’60s British rock'n'roll, the phenomenally-named Ivor Arbiter: So back inna day, same way "Harley Street" meant doctors, "Savile Row" meant tailors, "Fleet Street" meant lawyers and journalists ... well, those all had several centuries' bona fides, or perhaps mala fides, but this whole rock'n'roll thing had gotten serious enough (meaning MONEY MONEY MONEY) that it got its own niche in London, Denmark Street. Everybody trying to cash in on the equipment side of rock'n'roll set up shop in Demark Street, and when "Satisfaction" hit, EVERY one of those shops was probably torturing minor mobsters to find out what the fuck an FZ-1 was, and how to get one, or indeed many of them. Like everyone else at this juncture in their personal narrative involvement, all those guys got their FZ-1s and said "This sounds like SHIT," and all the kinds who were dying for what had just been dubbed "the fuzz pedal" came into their jobs, tried the FZ-1, and also said "This sounds like SHIT." But the Macaris were a persistent clan of, if we're honest, probably-mob-connected London Italians, and they performed the necessary shakedowns until somebody said "The bloke you want is Gary Hurst." Gary Hurst was one of the only guys in England, really in the world, who knew how any of this shit actually worked, and how to make bad things sound good; documents are spotty and he seemed to be a secretive type, but Hurst was critical at Vox at the beginning of the ’60s, which is the time you wanna be critical at Vox. (Another lovely case of fly-by-night-ass legends: when Vox started selling amps, they were two guys. One was Dick Denney, a WW2 radio operator and electrical engineer who figured out that you could likely use a radio amplifier as a guitar amplifier too, with a bit of work on signal filtering – and he was dead right, which is the main reason Voxes remain, I daresay, the simplest mass-production tube amps, and why they have such an immediate CLANK and BITE and CHEW when you have the pleasure of playing through a good one. There's not much circuit between you and the speaker! Even a Top Boost, the "Cadillac," is basically a couple medium gain stages, a cathode follower driving a Treble/Bass tone stack, the Cut control to dump excess treble from the power amp, and then either a half-12AX& to drive each power tube if they're really in Class A – which they are overwhelmingly not – or a standard phase inverter. Things with Vox get complex when you start looking at the versions with 2 preamps; some of them had the 12AX7/ECC83 design they nearly ALL use now, and some had a second preamp with a single EF86. An EF86 is a pentode, like bigger power tubes, and not a triode like the 12AX7; it will drive the TITS off that simple circuit and sound fantastic, and it will also constantly break the amp, because that's not what it was meant to do. Some Voxmen swear that the only REAL Vox is the EF86 version; others swear the inverse. I've never played an actual Vox with an EF86, cos those ain't been made for a while!, but I HAVE played a number of amps that have a channel dedicated to recreating & stabilizing the EF86 Vox. Some of them will make you want to jump around like an asshole and chew on Pete Townshend riffs all night – I've never OWNED one of these, partly because I would consider it a matter of principle to say "I'm sorry, it's great, but you're fucking shitting me with the idea of a $4,500 guitar amp," but the EF86 on a Matchless C30, i.e. DC30 for combo, HC30 for head, is DICK-bustin' good – and some of them, which I shall not name out of respect for their designers, remind you exactly why all this shit had to be totally redesigned when pedals came along. Victory VC35 Copper.) Anyway, the Macaris got Gary Hurst to redesign the FZ-1 into an actual good pedal, and they named it the Tone Bender. There are one trillion Tone Benders now, and unfortunately other duties call and I can't talk about this guy as much as I want to, but the other big shop down Denmark Street from Macari's was called Sound City, and was run by the aforementioned Ivor Arbiter, who's one of the best types of guys – a complete scammer who also improves human life enormously. If you've ever heard of the Dallas-Arbiter Rangemaster?, the killer treble booster that was the key to Brian May's tone – good Vox, cranked up NORMAL and not Top Boost, classic-type treble booster (I heartily recommend the Analog Man Beano Boost), and pickups with enough mumbo to get the thing distorting? Then you just have to be as good as Brian May. Which no one is. Top 5 guitarist ever, easy: I'm not really a listmaker, and rather dislike the practice, so it kind of took me aback to realize the other day that my personal top 5 guitarists isn't even a question – WITH the caveat that Hendrix can't be on there, because it's all under his sun, none of it exists without Solar Jimi Radiation as the transcendental signifier, and in no order: Shawn Lane, Allan Holdsworth, Frank Zappa, Steve Howe, Brian May. It's like reciting my address. I didn't even choose; it's just there. You ever heard about Sound City amps, the predecessors to Hiwatts, designed by the same guy (Dave Reeves) and now revived by Fryette/VHT? That was Ivor Arbiter, of Sound City, commissioning amps to make him "louder than Marshalls." And he fucking DID. And in this case, everyone wants an FZ-1, but it sucks, so Macari's gets Gary Hurst to rebuild it as a Tone Bender, there are at least 4 great original Tone Bender evolutions, and now there have been a billion? Ivor Arbiter had to send an employee to Macari's IN COSTUME, because they would've known exactly what was going on, to buy a Tone Bender – I believe it was the version now called the Mark 1.5 – so they could take it back to Sound City and rip it apart. And rip they did, and reassemble they ... sorta did?, and that's the Fuzz Face. Hendrix, Eric Johnson, all them dudes, it's Ivor Arbiter being a beneficent scumbag. JESUS I got caught on the first part of this, and I probably have to do a "pedals and studio shit" show, but the BEGINNING of the answer was thus: The idea of a "pedal company" didn't exist until the late ’70s, and the idea of taking those circuits and making them sound as good as possible AND work as well as possible with other pedals? That wasn't till the late ’90s/early ’00s DIY and "boutique" boom. Nobody building early fuzzes gave one second's thought to how they'd work in chain with other pedals ... because there were no other pedals! MXR – and this was where the studio shit came in: nobody fucking knows what a mixer is – was the first "pedal company," and even then, they made most of their money on studio and live sound gear. It wasn't till MXR that anyone would think "I want THAT phaser because it's an MXR, and I love their other shit"; you probably didn't have a realistic choice about 95% of pedals. Until MXR becomes truly a pedal company, and Boss is allowed to partition itself from Roland, nobody thought very much about ANY circuit beyond "does it do the thing it does," and when the MXR/Boss generation and *especially* the guys after them, the early DIY guys who have sometimes gone onto Big Dealdom (Jorge Tripps of Way Huge, the era when Electro-Harmonix really went into crazy mass production – TALK about the world's most necessary scammer, Mike Matthews, jesus christ – ... it turned out that the original circuits were all kinda broken pieces of shit, but if you fixed them, they sounded wrong, and that's been Pedal World for 30 years. Someone had a problem in 1974, he half-halfassed a solution, the solution causes 38 problems, and it's also WHY the thing sounds so fucking GOOD. // I tell you this, though, as evidently a Pedalman: I likes to have certain places I know I can go for certain things, right? Real old crunchy analog delay and modulation, EHX. 1960s-1980s classics, made better, FUNCTIONAL, and will probably sound better too, Analog Man. All the classic MXR shit, MXR. Things that maaaaaybe could be done analog, but would be huge and cost more than a guitar, Strymon. Any "amp in a box plus we added 3 things," the Greeks – Tsakalis and Crazy Tube Circuits. If you get nothing more from my life's work than Tsakalis and Crazy Tube Circuits, it was worth it. "Omnibus" pedals where I need 17 kinds of something and controls that actually word, Boss. I don't know if I'll ever love a delay more than the Memory Man, but if someone who wasn't into delay suddenly needed it or really wanted to learn about it, I would say "Boss DD-200" every time. Fuzz is still the black hole for me, because I mostly don't play single-coil guitars into tweedy or Marshally amps, and I'm still hunting the fuzz that I can actually use without changing everything else. I've been through so many, K. So many. I paid a fuckin' guy to make me a fuckin' replica of Robert Fripp's Burns Buzzaround, and it still wasn't right. But fuzz is also a detour. And what REALLY concerned me was "gain-stage pedals," which is a totally wrong description – very few produce drive or distortion by adding gain; many of them LOSE gain; that's not how this shit works – but a description which the Rabblement, nonetheless, can comprehend. "Drive stages" would be better, but "drive" means "medium-low crunch" now. "Distortion stages" would be best of all, but YOU know plenty well what people think "distortion pedal" means. And then I found The Guys. And The Guys are in reorganization right now, which is great on one level – the company won't just stop existing, and the new owners are fucking freaks like us – but less great in that, for the moment, they aren't making a lot of their old catalogue, and I'm not sure how much of it they're going to revive. So you'll probably have to go used, which you probably should anyway, but: Mad Professor. Mad Professor, in Finland, so of course I didn't know. If you're REALLY a pervert for this shit, you will know – oh, HOW you will know – the name Björn Juhl. He's a legend in Europe, less so here, but he's the guy behind BJFE, Bearfoot, and recently an attempt to design very cheap and very simple, but still good, pedals, a thing called Onecontrol. His BJFE and Bearfoot pedals are one-by-one handmade, they usually have a color in the name, and he personally sparkle-paints them and slaps on the names in emulsion or Whiteout. For Euros, he's like the Dumble of pedals. Björn never ran Mad Professor, but he did a lot of designs for them, and they are THE ONLY company I know that you can trust with every level of drive, from slight boost to blown-out distortion. If I had to play through one-channel clean amps, forever, and get my "lead channel" from a pedal, first I'd kill myelf, but then I'd use the Mad Professor Amber Overdrive. Whatever gain thing you want, go to them. The Little Green Wonder is the best and most insanely versatile take on a Tube Screamer. The only TWO pedals that actually sound like Dumbles, depending on which Dumble Thing you want, are the MP Twimble and Sky Blue Overdrive. Everyone knows you can never sound like Eric Johnson for several reasons, one of which is his fucking insane signal chain; MP rebuilt that entire signal chain with analog parts, the fuzz and the Tube Driver and the 2 cranked Marshalls, in a pedal called the Golden Cello, and then they threw in a digital tape echo emulator. The best, THE best, hands-down, no-conditions-or-caveats digital recreation of an Echoplex is Mad Professor's new Hand-Wired Deep Blue Delay. If you want early 2000s distortion, Stone Grey Distortion. If you want ’70s classic rock crunch, Red One Distortion. It's all there. It's ALL THERE. And I'm not sure how the generational changeover will affect this, but for years, they offered both standard mods and mod requests, and they were REAL. I used to have an Amber Overdrive and an Amber Overdrive Custom Midas Touch next to each other on my board, and they are NOT the same pedal, but they're also NOT two different pedals with the same name. Go looking. This conversation never happened. Oh, and BJFE/Bearfoot made something that nobody else has even considered making: a pedal called the Model H that's dead on Hiwatt with the gain to about halfway, and above that, it's Björn Juhl's imaginary version of the higher-gain, master-volume amp that Hiwatt would've made if they'd survived longer. And the best version is the original 3-knob, which is also cheapest, because people think 4 and 5 knobs are better, but you want the 3. And that conversation extremely never happened. //

They absolutely make you do it at jazz school and they absolutely think it sounds good

And I would love, if you have it in you, for an eventual episode on tape and its invention for the purposes of Hitler’s quantum superposition

Some them knobs are variable resistors, cranking up or down linearly or perhaps logarithmically. I’m not familiar with which are used where. Built a push button noise maker from a kit that had two potentiometers and a button with a speaker for output. Sounded like each knob changed one of the two input frequencies and the result was the harmonics of the two through a single speaker. Squeaks, rumbles and perfect intervals and everything in between.

No, it's facing the normal way, I just know its cheeks have been clapped

This is complex enough to start here – Strats had already existed for several years before humbuckers were invented. Fender were using their own single-coils, Gibson and others were using P90s, there were a few outliers like gold-foils and lipstick pickups, but the first guitar with humbuckers was the 1957 Goldtop Les Paul. Various kinds of single-coils were basically all that existed. And the Strat was not MEANT to have those "in-between" positions on the pickup switch, what people call "2 and 4" or "bridge/middle and neck/middle" – those were the accidental discovery of guitarists. It was meant to have 3 pickups, basically the same, for 3 basic sounds. But when people discovered the in-between settings, they found that 1) you get that "cluck" and "quack" out of, primarily, phase cancellation in the midrange between two parallel pickups 2) SOME middle pickups were installed like the neck and bridge, but SOME were put in the other direction, so now there's a reverse wind, 3) and of those, SOME used reverse-polarity magnet poles, so in parallel with the bridge or neck, they cancelled hum. A humbucker is also "RWRP," reverse wind & reverse polarity, but there, the two coils are connected in SERIES, not parallel. That makes the whole sound bigger, the output stronger, the resonant frequency lower, and you get the same double-flip effect: electromagnetic noise is cancelled, because the coils are out of phase, but since the magnets are reverse polarity on each coil, they flip the actual guitar signal back into phase. (Basically the key is to understand that standard 60 Hz noise is electromagnetic background radiation getting picked up by the coil windings. Attach a second coil, opposite-wound, you cancel that background noise. But the MAGNETS that induce your moving string to create current/voltage in the pickup coils, they're ALSO reversed, so the background hum is phased out and the signal survives.) Honestly, I've never found much reason to use the middle pickup on a Strat, and neither do most other people – it's really only there to enable the parallel out-of-phase positions. I've never had a 3-pickup guitar that wasn't 3 single-coils (I'm pretty much 2 PAFy humbuckers most of the time, Strat/Tele occasionally), but that whole humbucker-single-humbucker thing you get on a lot of shreddy guitars – either it's just a 3-way switch, with a single coil instead of the 2-humbucker middle sound, or it's a 5-way switch, and in positions 2 and 4, it coil-taps one of the humbuckers to imitate that "2 parallel singles out of phase" Strat thing

This is a GREAT question and something I wanna get to in more detail, but basically: I could quote the engineer's definition of impedance, I could tell you to "review Ohm's Law," and nobody would learn a fuckin' thing, because that's not really how it functions in guitarland. So this is not a "technically complete" explanation, but there are basically 2 things to understand about impedance, as it relates to these matters: all sonic signals that have been converted into electric ones have VOLTAGE and CURRENT, right? Voltage is the "content," what the signal is doing, and current is the "medium," the amount of material that's carrying the voltage waveform, so – #1. For guitar purposes, IMPEDANCE is VOLTAGE divided by CURRENT. #2. For God being a dickhead purposes, HIGH IMPEDANCE and LOW IMPEDANCE mean the exact opposite of what they sound like. Let us say, for example, that you have a signal like the signal from an electric guitar pickup, which has tons of detail in the voltage waveform, and almost no current. Well if you look up nearly any amp schematic, you'll see that one of the first things (often THE first thing) is a big-ass resistor running to ground, like 1meg ohm, dumped straight out of the circuit. That resistor is there to cut down on ambient current within the signal, because if the VOLTAGE WAVEFORM were way too small relative to the AMOUNT OF CURRENT, it wouldn't be able to DRIVE that current – i.e., print its waveform on all that current going forward. It would just get ate the hell up. Now here's #2, the part where God is a dickhead: that situation, in which a small signal is made easier to drive a circuit, is HIGH-IMPEDANCE. Every natural supposition of the human brain says it would be LOW-impedance, it is fuckin' impeding less, but because scientists are perverts and build on their own dumb terminology for centuries, #2, at greater length. A HIGH-IMPEDANCE signal is one with more voltage than current, which allows the signal waveform (in the form of voltage here) to drive that electrical current forward through the circuit, as intended. A LOW-IMPEDANCE signal, output, etc., has much more current than voltage, which would in fact impede it very the fuck much if it were the input stage of an amplifier. BUT: this is where each has its use. Boss was arguably the first pedal company to figure out a set of specs they could use over and over, and then just pop in the circuit for the effect of any given pedal; this is part of why almost every Boss looks the same, in different colors. And these numbers will shift a little bit over time, but the crucial Boss discovery that almost everyone has ripped off ever since: HIGH-IMPEDANCE INPUT, LOW-IMPEDANCE OUTPUT. So you plug your cable into a Boss pedal, and the first thing it hits will be a 1meg ohm resistor (sometime 500k ohm), fuckin' huge resistor, just like the amp. That lets your small guitar signal (no offense) collect the current still hanging around and drive it through the effect circuit; it doesn't have to shove all that "material" around. 1meg ohm high-impedance input, easy for waveform to go through pedal. Then, on the output, 1k ohm resistor, sometimes even smaller, because now you've got the *tone*, and you wanna blast that motherfucker as hard as possible into whatever comes next. (Boss had the advantage here of realizing that people were gonna be chaining pedals together.) So you've got your effect-altered HIGH-impedance signal, and then you use a LOW-impedance output to punch the signal as hard as possible into the next thing in line, so you use a lot of current to put the signal across at maximum studliness. In amps, this gets MUCH more implex (and interesting), but in most pedals since the 1980s, you look up the input and output impedances, and you'll see something like a Boss. High-impedance voltage waveform input, low-impedance rope-blasting output. (And this is a major reason that so many old fuzzes sound awful with modern pedals: nobody was thinking about chaining 7 pedals together in 1966! So on a Fuzz Face, for example, you have a super-super-low input impedance, and if you put that after a modern pedal that's firing a cannon of signal into the fuzz, it sounds horrendous; it's basically being blown out in every electrical parameter. But a Fuzz Face also does that magic thing where you can go from full Hendrix to literally cleaner-than-clean off just the volume knob of a Strat, and that wouldn't work if it had a modern input: pickups are very high-impedance outputs, and when you hear that cleanup, you're basically hearing the Fuzz Face say "This is nothing, this is barely a signal, is this thing even on?" Fix the Fuzz Face input, and it'll work infinitely better on a pedalboard, but it also won't clean up with just the guitar volume.)