Guitar sound, what is it exactly?

Ummm???

I have been thinking a lot about this one recently. There are a gazillion companies around the world making sound altering gadgets for electric guitar and guitarists the world over are falling for these little coloured boxes. Firstly to qualify myself, I play a three-way switch Stratocaster with one lead and possibly a Fender Twin Reverb amp if I think I need reverb. If I need distortion or the polite term.. overdrive, then I turn the fuher up.
Think of me as a purist. I have copious 'sound' options from the Twin Reverb and I have three pickups, a volume and tone controls to determine what comes out of the guitar. It can put the amp into overdrive with the flick of my guitar volume control, bingo! I have  overdrive. I can clean it up by simply backing off the guitar. I can make it zing or I can make it creamy cool. Who needs quack anyway?
Think back a couple of decades to the introduction of amp sims and modelling amps. Shock horror, this is pure sacrilege, and amp simulation of a real amplifier and with every effect you could possibly imagine thrown in. Guitarists turned away from these things in droves but what were the alternatives. Well little coloured boxes, effects pedals. There were overdrives and there were overdrives, There was distortion (not to be confused) and there was distortion.
Back in the dark ages pedals were all transistor (analogue) devices. They weren't attempting to duplicate a cranked up Marshall, these were germanium fuzz pedals using a little magical transistor circuitry. Of course the most famous musical piece to feature the germanium fuzz pedal was the Rolling Stones - Satisfaction. Funnily enough Keef didn't use a pedal on our 1965 tour of AU/NZ. he just turned the fuhing amp up, drove it into distortion. There were many fuzz pedals around in the later 1960's, the Tone Bender (I had one), the Fuzz Face as used by Jimmy Hendrix, there were heaps of them. The pedal craze had started.
The next big pedal influence on guitar music was the Vox (Italian) Wah Wah pedal. As a pedal I liked the wah wah effect as it isn't a passive pedal sitting there swishing from side to side or just buzzing, the wah wah was an actual playing thing. While not quite the same effect, I settled for the sweep of the tone control on my guitar.
Pedals of all sorts were coming thick and fast, guys would have three or even four. It became a battery nightmare. There were phasers, flangers, treble boosters (there's a knob on your amp for that), compressors etc etc but we were still in the analogue domain and then hell opened up.. digital. No longer did we have germanium fuzz pedals but we had a simulation of a fuzz pedal, digital modelling. It just goes to show that if you persevere long enough and flatter everyone with the latest technology then it can pay off.
It has always got me how something that was so frowned upon can now be accepted. Perhaps it was the iPhone where guys became accepting  of the digital tech, snapping up these little mutilator boxes where their guitar signal is being converted from analogue to digital and back again ten times before it reaches their amps. Hey, a tube amp at the end of it, what's the point?
Sound, electric guitar sound, has played an important part in music forever both live and on recordings. The greatest guitar sounds have come from pure guitar, lead and an amp since rock and roll and beyond if we take in the jazzers and the old blues cats. It has never been about technology. As clever as a Helix or a Headrush flashy digital box may be just how many types of distorted guitar sounds do you need?
Is there a clean pedal? No, not necessary. You have fourteen push buttons for that.