As a guitarist, you know exactly what I mean. Thin distortion from a pedal. An overdriven amp would sound better, but at the end of the day, it's still a disguise for poor technique. Come on, mjp, don't play dumb.
I'm not playing dumb. I wouldn't, nor would anyone I ever met or worked with, call pedal distortion a "wet" sound. When you said "wet" I thought you were referring to reverb, which just goes to show that that is not the way to talk about sound.
I prefer amp overdrive to a pedal too, who wouldn't? I used a Marshall 50 watt 2x12 combo with a Les Paul Special and/or a Junior and
no pedals at all for 15 years. But I have an MXR Distortion + from the 70's that I could run between a Les Paul Junior and a solid state amp today and you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between that and the guitar plugged into a Marshall with the preamp cranked all the way up (or "gain" or whatever they call it now). Come on over, I'll show you! ;)
It's not good to get mad at each other over musical taste. We're all in the same gang. Music is music. If my comments were too snarky, forgive me. Dodging gob and beer bottles in all those stinky little clubs effectively beat the propriety out of me, and in the 30 years since I have not been able to gain any of it back.
I agree with most of your post, but this? I don't know what you are basing this on.
I love most of Princes music but he's hardly what I'd call revolutionary.
Can you explain more what you mean by changed?
ROC, how old are you? Did you listen to any pop or
funk music before Prince became popular? The pre-Prince and post-Prince dividing line is quite obvious. Maybe it's hard to see in retrospect, but every record - literally overnight - came out sounding like a Prince record. It was kind of weird and shocking, and if you didn't listen to Prince before it happened you might just think, "oh, people sure are making different sounding records these days."
Being in the twin cities at the time we were well aware of Prince, and when something like Michael Jackson's
Thriller came out, we immediately noticed how obviously he was lifting bits of Prince, vocally and thematically from
Dirty Mind,
Controversy and the first
Time album (all three of those records were all Prince, with the exception of Morris Day singing on
The Time). Jackson's pre-
Thriller album
Off the Wall, sounds slick, tame and predictable.
Thriller is hard and jarring in comparison. What happened between the production of those two records? Prince happened. And Jackson is only the most obvious example in that shift, that stripping of the left over disco-gloss and return to hard funk. There were many others who also altered their sound radically at the same time.
The whole sound of the pop/r&b/funk of the 80's has it's roots in that handful of Prince and Time albums made between 1980 and 82. All of it. When he turned that corner with
Dirty Mind, you have to remember, people (and reviewers) were saying, "What the fuck
is this?" People laughed at him. He was booed off the stage when he opened for the Rolling Stones. But the people who made records were listening, and they must have liked what they were hearing, because everyone turned that corner right behind him and the sound of pop music abruptly changed.
That's what I meant.
And I don't necessarily like what that change lead to either. Pop music today is all shine and no substance. But technology would have caused that shift eventually no matter who or what happened in the 80's.