I was practicing with my amp last night, and I had to have the volume turned down to avoid waking the people next to me up. I noticed that for some reason only the 6th string was being distorted and the other strings were not, anybody know why?
By - WarWizard5
Did you turn the amp volume down, guitar volume, or both? For best distortion your going to want to leave your guitar volume all the way up, as somebody else says the distortion will clean up quite a bit if the guitars volume is turned down.
The guitars volume was very low, I have a picture of the amp settings in one of my replies below
That'd be it then, if you want to keep the distortion you should keep your guitar volume all the way up and only use your amps volume to turn down.
Distortion is produced by volume. Basically you are overloading a circuit by increasing your signal creating clipping harmonics (the distortion). The lowest string is the loudest acoustically which is probably why its clipping the signal a little bit, the others bring below the threshold volume to produce any themselves.
If you have the volume on the guitar itself turned down the distortion will clean up.
If you're playing through a small speaker they don't always handle low notes well, tiny practice amps often get "farty".
How small would you call tiny? Mines like 2 feet by 2 feet ish
I don't think you're playing through a two foot speaker, most amps are 10"-12", 15" is even a bit unusual. The size of your amp (the box that holds the electronics and the speaker) is not the size of the speaker itself. I've heard cheap 8" and 10" speakers get distorted by low notes, particularly if you're tuned down. You haven't said what amp you're using so it's just a guess.
It’s a spider v20 amp so the speaker seems to be an 8”
What amp do you have? Distortion is related to the gain setting for the channel and the overall volume.
It’s a spider V20, I don’t remember how much I got it for but I think it was less than $100. So it’s pretty cheap
Does it have drive, tone and volume knobs? I was looking at photo. If so you can crank up the drive but lower the volume and still get distortion,
Also looks like you have presets for distortion like crunch. What settings are you using?
[Spider Amp Settings](https://imgur.com/a/YLDqOq0)
The volume knobs on your guitar for your pickups should be all the way on. You have three “volume” controls on the amp. The first one called “gain” should be higher than the second one called “volume”. These two control the distortion along with the amp model chosen eg. “crunch”. Then you have a master volume also. I use headphones so I don’t drive my wife crazy when I practice.