What kind of dirt sounds are most appealing to you?

[DRodriguez]

Super boring question but I got wondering about it.

I dig things that sound like they are broken or malfunctioning. I want my fuzz to sound like something went wrong rather than a massive wall of sound.
Make it sound like my guitar cable is cutting out, like my speaker is flabbing and somebody swapped a tube for a mason jar. Make it sound like the sound guy quit halfway through the gig and pres are unabashedly clipping

What do y'all look for in your sounds?

[reckon luck]

Textured/gritty overdrive: misbiased gnarliness without heavy saturation. SSBS dirt, Infanem Improbability Drive / Driving Notion, etc..

[$harkToootth]

I like it all man Anything and everything between mild psych fuzz - full blown harsh noise wall crackle / sonic devastation.

[Kacey Y]

I can't even pick a top 5, honestly. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I think of overdrives, distortions and fuzzes (or amp breakup, whatever) as flavors or colors in a palate. I want different sorts for different applications, I like to mix and stack and blend and do all sorts of things.

Most of my favorite dirt tones are combinations of things or sounds I get by combining or using things unusually. I've never been much into the broken circuit, dying battery lo-fi fuzz thing, but I find it cool when other people do cool stuff with it. Personally I tend to use very thick, low heavy fuzzes with smooth top end or very pushed, focused, grindy distortion with a lot of frequency specific (upper mids, usually) boost being fed into it.

[friendship]

My very first dirt pedal was a Noise Swash, which pretty much sums it up for me.

[$harkToootth]

@friendship and @corey - YEP!!!

I do like to combine dirt with some sort of filtering though. I really enjoy those 'sick' 'throbbing' 'industrial' sounds. Digital dirt is good for this application too. OG Geiger Counter is one of my favorite pedals.

[BetterOffShred]

When I play an overdrive style pedal like the Boneshaker or red llama or even black forest, I like to hear the guitar. If that makes sense.. it's still the sound of that guitar pushed really hard, but you can still tell it's a Les Paul say for instance. The sound is not masking of the device that creates it.

With fuzz, yeah I'm into that for the weird shit. I like glitchy bleeping, whistles, sputtering death, all of it. Not to sit and write top 40 pop tunes or anything but those type of devices really bring out other things that you probably wouldn't have tried otherwise.

[BoatRich]

I like fuzz to be a wall of sound but with some weirdness? I think the Great Destroyer pulls that off super well.

For distortion I’m stuck between an HM-2 in full chainsaw, or something like a 5150 being hit with a boost? Mostly just raw and loud and midrange focused.

For overdrive definitely my v4 or plexi on the edge of breakup, or something like the fuck that crackles and sputters out

[MechaGodzilla]

When I play an overdrive style pedal like the Boneshaker or red llama or even black forest, I like to hear the guitar. If that makes sense.. it's still the sound of that guitar pushed really hard, but you can still tell it's a Les Paul say for instance. The sound is not masking of the device that creates it.

This is one side of it but I like pedals that you can really tell are doing something when they're on. Even the Broadcast (which I kind of have as an always-on preamp/booster thing most of the time), you really miss it when it's off. It's a balance between not masking the guitar's character like you say, but also not being so subtle as to be motherfucking "t r a n s p a r e n t"

[Kacey Y]

I've been learning about basics of analog circuitry, RC filters, Transistors, Op Amps and all the ins and outs of pedal designing (including the actual equations for how you choose components for frequencies, gain, etc.) just so I can realize some ideas that I try to do with several pedals and some creative stacking/routing. Can't guarantee anything I do with it will be worth a shit to anyone but me (maybe not even me), but I'm doing it anyway.

[$harkToootth]

I love how 'off' and 'sagging' HELLHAMMER's tones were. They're almost nasally. One of my favorite dirt sounds below.

NSFW: show

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dayEdtmre3Y[/youtube]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dayEdtmre3Y

[Kacey Y]

I love how 'off' and 'sagging' HELLHAMMER's tones were. They're almost nasally. One of my favorite dirt sounds below.

NSFW: show

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dayEdtmre3Y[/youtube]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dayEdtmre3Y

I think that's down to there being some weird phasing between turning the treble and presence on a JCM800 all the way UP and the tone on a humbucker equipped guitar all the way DOWN. There's some similar stuff with Obituary, where they play with really shrill settings, but use the middle position, neck position or bridge humbucker with tone rolled off.

[Ghost Hip]

As a listener: All of them honestly.

Me personally as a player? Glassy/filtered distortion. Big saggy/synthy fuzzes, and shitty overdrives.

[crochambeau]

It really depends on the source for me.

In playing guitar I lean more toward the drone / slow doom realm, so sustain is a big factor and I favor more of a low crumble than a tearing paper note. I prefer to play the amp/room, so set & forget one trick ponies are welcome (so long as the trick works in the room),

For oscillator work, anything goes. I find sputtery stuff is often the most textural because you can exploit the transition between cut-off and conductivity with either inherent modulation or summing to beat notes. That said, I often hit stuff hard with oscillators (I'm usually in the 1 volt per decade range, limiting my output to safeish levels (15 volts) but well beyond what is considered clean in most things) so something that bottlenecks the signal often gets booted to another instrument type, or a lower amplitude side chain.

With drum machines I enjoy gobs of floor noise and self oscillation ranges as options. Bottlenecking snubbed above sometimes benefits the beat work. Broken sounding stuff fits the percussive stuff, sloppy waves and rattling body panels.

[sylnau]

Borken stuff like DRod said... but I'm more into subtle broken stuff (just to add some original character).