I recently watched the Rick Beato interview of Billy Corgan on Youtube.

One of the most interesting things he said is that Butch Vig played him Smells Like Teen Spirit before its release, and one of Corgan's reactions was "you got the guitar sound from me."

In other words, Billy Corgan had a certain idea about how to orchestrate/record/overdub guitars, and Butch Vig sort of took that sound and utilized it throughout Nevermind.

Now, I don't really care whether Billy Corgan is "right" or not. That's a sort of gossipy thing. But I went back and listened to Siamese Dream and Nevermind and those guitars do have a distinctive, fat, growly sound to them.

The main question here is: how can I learn more about how this sound was orchestrated, perhaps as an entree into audio engineering principles of distortion and timbre, etc.?

I have some degree of (self-taught) digital signal processing background so I'm comfortable with notions of audio filtering, fourier analysis, spectrograms, overtone series, etc.

Any good references (especially those that go into juicy detail) would be most appreciated!