Let's Break Sound Things

Why I Love Distortion

Clean Is Boring

Almost everything that’s positive about modern digital production has to do with it being clean and pristine. Recordings are a near-perfect digital representation of what’s captured, and processing is exact, precise, and dependable. The problem is, this doesn’t feel very exciting or emotional a lot of the time. Why? A lot of that has to do with how different this is from the sounds we’re used to from the most listened to records of the past. Clean and pristine, in the context of music, often doesn’t match our preference for what a basic, finished track should sound like. That actually goes for most genres, and for most styles, from quiet and mellow to loud and violent. Because of the history of recording with lofi equipment, we’ve come to expect things to sound fat and compressed.

That also ties into how our mind interprets sounds from the world. When you record a sound or a voice and listen to it out of context, it usually sounds odd and surprisingly thin. Overly dynamic as well. In a real-world situation, our brain naturally equalizes levels and balances frequencies to make interpretation of what’s going on easier.

So now we have several good reasons to try and both level out and beef up our sounds, to make our minds feel more comfortable when we hear music.

What can we do? Is distortion the thing that can solve this for us?

In more cases than not, totally, yes!

All of the world-famous mic preamps out there are loved mainly because of the way that particular piece of gear overdrives a signal into distortion. Not the only reason, but a big part of the pull toward analog gear like EQs, compressors, or big consoles is the specific type of distortion and saturation they impart on a sound. So we know it’s a desirable sound in production, and it’s a common method shared by many, if not most, producers out there.

But can distortion really help in any situation and make any source better? Well, I’m willing to bet: almost any. And before you go run your drum machines through a fuzz pedal (although that might sound very cool), that’s not the type of thing I’m pushing for here.

Let me tell you why almost all of us will consider the effect of mild distortion to be a positive thing on almost any source in a production.

When it comes to drums, they may be difficult to get “loud enough” or “thick enough” sometimes. In most cases, that has to do with the transients being too loud, and the sustain of the sound not biting through enough because of it. The crest factor is too high, meaning the difference in amplitude between the peaks and the valleys of the waveform is basically too wild. When the peaks are hitting zero, we’re still not hearing the sound as very “loud” or “powerful.”

Let’s hit those drums with some distortion and see what happens. The peaks will be reduced or completely cut off, harmonics will be introduced above the fundamental of the tone, and the sustain will be made louder. We’re left with a fatter sound, less subtle and faint, more powerful, and able to cut through a mix of other layered sounds much better than it did before. This exact effect can translate just as well to many other instruments or synths.

There’s always a risk of adding too much of a good thing, but it’s very possible to be successfully subtle with different types of distortion, to get a great result without the complete breakage of a sound, like with a high-gain guitar.

What Was That About Harmonics?

• Harmonic Distortion
  This is what happens when a sound gets slightly overdriven in a musical way. Extra harmonic content gets added, making it warmer, fuller, and more exciting without sounding broken. These are extra frequencies that appear above the original (or fundamental) tone. They’re mathematically related overtones that give sounds their character.

• Soft Clipping
  A gentle form of limiting where the peaks of a sound are rounded off instead of chopped harshly. It smooths things out while still making everything louder and punchier.

• Tape Distortion
  The warm, gooey kind of saturation that comes from hitting magnetic tape too hard. It compresses, rounds off transients, rolls off the highs (hence warm), and adds, let’s call it, vintage fatness.

• Transformer Clipping
  Push a signal hard through a chunky transformer and you get saturation with a bit of attitude. Thick and warm, but with a subtle click or chug at the onset of transients. Great for adding weight and punch without going overboard.

• Waveshaping
  A more technical way to distort: you remap the shape of the audio wave itself. Can be subtle or extreme, and often used in synths or plugins to create custom distortion tones.

• Overdrive
  Classic guitar pedal territory. It’s the warm, fuzzy breakup that happens when a circuit is pushed. A bit more aggressive than saturation, but still musical.

Middle disclaimer: I'm not pretending to be an expert on signal processing or wave shaping, I'm here to motivate you from a musical point of view! What I do know is that it's very hard to generalize about how any one signal will be audibly affected. You can make predictions but we'll need to experiment to get the results we want.

What About That Elusive Word That Always Comes Up, Color?

Color, if you ask me, when it comes to manipulating tone and shape of a sound, is simply adding distortion and saturation. There are so many different ways this breakdown of waveforms can take place, and even more analog or digital devices to make it happen. Lots of varying “colors.”

You can, and should, be using all of those available coloration methods to set the tone and emotion of your tracks. It’s the most pleasant ear candy ever, to master the art and balancing act of driving different types of distortion onto different sounds, panning the effects into different spaces in your arrangement and mix. Automating the degree of distortion from one section of your song to another, that’s just super cool and interesting.

Consider This…

Generally speaking, adding distortion to sounds in the low-end, meaning the bass parts of your arrangement, tends to strip that sound of actual bass frequencies. The harmonic content in the midrange gets excited and accentuated, but the low end itself disappears with increasing levels of saturation. This is important to just keep in mind when balancing tone between different sounds.

Likewise, in the top-end, with hi-hats and shakers. Because distortion has a numbing effect on transient sounds, it can actually be the perfect solution for taming very sharp percussion instruments. This effect, combined with the gentle roll-off of extreme high frequencies (akin to tape saturation), makes distortion a perfect tool for mastering or final mix touches. It mellows out excessive peaks in the highs and gives a tucked-in overall balance.

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I’ll leave you with a few ideas to try the next time you’re producing, ones you may not have tried already:

• Go wild with saturation on certain sounds or vocals, but in parallel. So reduce the mix knob.

• Distort lower mids and upper highs to taste with a multiband saturator on the mix bus, for a louder, more impactful sound.

• Distort reverbs, especially on drums, for a blown-up awesome sound.

• Distort delay signals for a powerful, otherworldly delay, by adding distortion after the send effect itself.

• Add distortion to hi-hats, not to make them aggressive, but to make them smoother.

• Use distortion to bring out the sustain in various percussion elements that may need it, like claps.

• Make interludes or break sections of a track where you distort and EQ most of the whole arrangement, but only for that section. This adds fun and contrast.

• For lead sounds in need of a bigger stereo image, try distorting the left or right channel only. Or different kinds on each!