Analogue distortion offers the chance to drag your sounds and mixes through the dirt with our grab-bag of distortion-based production and sound design techniques. The focus here is specifically on analogue-style overdrive and saturation – we’ll be doing cool things with the digital alternatives in a future article.
Don’t Misunderstand Distortion
A common misconception among newcomers to music production is that distortion is all about overtly transformative decimation – screaming overdrive, that sort of thing. While this is understandable, given the catch-all terminology and its ’rock guitar’ connotations, distortion is a far more diverse effect than that, coming in various flavours and degrees of severity (see below). In fact, much of the time, it’s at its most sonically useful when applied gently, brightening up lacklustre source material by adding aurally satisfying upper harmonics. So, if you ever find yourself struggling to give a drum track, vocal or bassline sufficient presence, before getting heavy-handed with EQ, try a bit of tube saturation or the lightest touch of fuzzbox emulation.
Understanding the nuances of distortion and how to capitalise on them is essential to successful mixing, so don’t overlook the subject as you develop your skill set.
Know The Difference
Following on from the previous tip, get to know the different types of distortion plugins available to you and what they are and aren’t good for. Very loosely speaking, at one end of the scale, you’ve got tape saturation, which is just the thing for bringing warmth, retro vibe and a ‘gluing’ effect to individual channels or the mix bus, while at the other, clippers, wave folders and the like have huge creative value when it comes to edgy and extreme sound design. In between those two points, overdrive, fuzz and general ‘distortion’ effects deliver the readily identifiable distortion associated with – but, as we’ll explain shortly, by no means exclusive to – guitars.
Reactive distortion
Certain distortion plugins feature envelope followers with which you can get your saturation or overdrive moving in response to the dynamic profile of the input signal or, better yet, and external one. The internal sidechain is helpful for working expressive emphasis and bite into dynamically expansive parts, while the external sidechain can be exploited to imprint the rhythmic shape of a percussion track, say, onto the textural movement of a pad, vocal or ambience layer. One extremely effective plugin for envelope-following distortion is Blue Cat Audio’s Destructor, and you can see and hear it doing exactly that in this video from Plugin Boutique.
Parallel distortion
Distortion is a prime candidate for parallel processing – that is, mixing processed and dry versions of the same signal to find a creatively optimum combination of the two. Blending a heavily overdriven sound (as in, crank that drive knob all the way up!) with its unprocessed self yields a different end result than simply dialling back the intensity of the 100% wet effect, as you’re merging the dynamics and subtleties of the clean original with the smashed-up, harmonically enriched mayhem of the distorted aftermath.
To make this happen, you can either tweak the dry/wet mix control on your distortion plugin, if it has one, or stick it on an auxiliary bus and send as much of the source track to it as required. The second option also opens up the potential for pre- and/or post-processing of the distorted signal with EQ, compression and any other effects you feel like piling on.
Distortion on send FX
Speaking of auxiliary busses, following a reverb or delay on a return channel with a distortion plugin is a surefire way to add interest to the texture of your tails and echoes. Whether you’re looking to apply heat and pressure to a reverb, or kick your delay taps into, well, overdrive, the harmonic seasoning and compression introduced by a hefty wodge of distortion never fails to change things up. And of course, while the sustained nature of those two processors makes them especially amenable to distortion, don’t be shy about distorting choruses, phasers, flangers and other send effects, too.
Guitar pedals aren’t just for guitars
Although presented as geared up for guitar first and foremost, stompbox-style distortion plugins (and, indeed, their hardware forebears) can work wonders on all sorts of other sounds as well. Being built with live instrumental input in mind, pedal-featuring packages such as Positive Grid Bias FX 2, IK Multimedia Amplitube, and Overloud TH3 impart a characterful kind of energy and fizz that can dramatically enhance synth leads, vocals, basses, and drums in particular, and, in broader terms, should have a place in every sound designer’s toolbox for general tone shaping.
Bass distortion for compatibility
Bass, be it electric or synthesized, is an instrument/element that should almost always have some degree of distortion brought to bear, and not only because it invariably sounds punchier and fatter for it. Extending your bass up into the low mids makes it much more audible when played back through the depressingly prevalent smaller speakers of laptops, phones, tablets, etc, and distortion is a great way to do it.
Fire up a multiband distortion plugin (FabFilter Saturn 2, Audio Damage Kombinat Tri, or iZotope Trash 2, for example) and set it to saturate only the higher frequencies of your bass part, leaving the rest untouched. It doesn’t take much of a harmonic boost in the right range to make your b-lines pop out on the diminutive systems that the kids are wont to do much of their listening on these days.
Decimate the comments with your own distortion techniques – we’d love to hear about them!