In either case, the sound created will be tangible to those who care, if by no other way then through some comparison to earlier sounds, processes, and recordings.
The variety of effects would seem to allow an infinite number of sounds to be used on the myriad of recordings made; however, in practice, this has not been the case. The desire of producers to make records that sound commercially familiar has created a remarkable number of productions that sound alike.
The phenomenon has been made easier by the variety of pre-set programs that come with most sound generators and processors. By switching from one setting to another, the sounds from dozens of records can be heard. The preset computer program in the processor generates nothing except in response to a signal passing through it. Here we have sonic artifacts that have become marketable commodities.
For instance, reverb sounds are cataloged by the type of instrument that might go through it as suggested by the manufacturer. A gated reverb snare exists on every processor made today.
Most reverb devices retain preset descriptions that reference devices of the past. A good example are “plate reverbs”, a reference to a mechanical device invented by EMT that in the mid-1960s revolutionized how reverb was generated in a studio.
The heart of rock and roll may be Cleveland, but it sounds like guitar distortion; in this case a common denominator is the Celestion G12 loudspeaker that is in an overwhelming number of guitar amplifiers made by a number of different manufacturers.
Ken Bran, the engineer who headed the introduction of the Marshall amplifier that was first made famous by Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, acknowledged that without Celestion, they couldn’t have accomplished that sound.
In the beginning, Celestion was probably unaware of the desirability of loudspeaker distortion. The company had spent decades trying to build distortion-less loudspeakers, but came to understand that distortion was actually a key selling point.
As Celestion’s promotional material states, “The paper edge cone of the classic G12 and it’s resonate break-up characteristics are the starting point from which many of the modern guitar loudspeakers have been developed”.
This loudspeaker was first introduced in 1969 and continues to be sold with the assurance that the characteristics of its distortion hasn’t changed through the years. Here is the subjective, absolutely unquantifiable attribute of some form of unique distortion that has become a marketable commodity.