Distortion Techniques with Andrew Scheps

00:00:07
Hello children! We're back and today we're going to distort things.

00:00:14
We're not going to mix things, we're not even gonna make things that are appropriate for a mix.

00:00:18
What we thought would be fun is for me to pull up a session, never listen to the song, we take some of the individual elements and find different ways to distort them.

00:00:28
And this is distortion that can be used purely as sound design to make a distorted thing or can be much more subtle to give you length or the appearance of a sort of older-style recording, that kinda thing, whatever.

00:00:41
So I'm going to be going through and soloing up tracks, we're using a song called 'Passerby' from a great LA band 'Halloway', you're never gonna hear the whole song but you're gonna hear bits of it.

00:00:50
First thing we're gonna do is work on kick drum.

00:00:54
I use Lo-Fi on kick drum probably 100% of the time.

00:00:59
Let's just start with that.

00:01:00
We've got a Lo-Fi and for me 1.0 on the distortion knob, here, is quite a bit but let me play you what that's doing to the kick so let's go to this nice, busy section here.

00:01:27
Lo-Fi is a clipper. What it does is it amplifies the waveform until it can start shaving off the top.

00:01:34
Now..

00:01:36
..that's basically the simplest type of distortion you can have is to push the waveform up or pull your rails down and I'm using the word 'rails' because voltage rails used to be - in the analog world - the loudest thing that could through a piece of equipment was determined by the power supply, so if you had +/-15V supply running a piece of gear if within the gear because of make-up gain or something you tried to create a voltage above 15V or below -15V it would just shave it off and be 15V.

00:02:07
Exactly the same thing in digital when you run out of bits.

00:02:10
When all the bits are '1' you can't describe a number that's higher. Now, there's another video which talks about floating point vs fixed point.. bla, bla bla..

00:02:19
In this instance we're pretending everybody is fixed point, we're pretending there is a maximum level and we're gonna push our waveform up until it shaves off the top.

00:02:27
What makes different clippers sound different, though, is the shape as it turns that corner.

00:02:33
It can either leave it very, very square or it can round it off, it's kinda like the knee on a compressor as you go from no clipping to clipping, how harsh is it going to be.

00:02:44
Lo-Fi acts kinda like a 2-stage clipper where it doesn't turning that corner until the very last minute but then it's nice and round. It's not really a terribly square clip.

00:02:53
So what I'm gonna do is cranking the distortion and you'll hear as we get into the sort of 3 up 8 how far this clipper can go, but then how, when I bring it back down to 1 it acts as much more of a subtle effect.

00:03:35
So you can hear as I can get up into the really clipped part of what this plug-in can do it starts to ring a little bit, the attack of the kick starts to go crazy and that's something that will happen with any type of distortion we put on the kick drum.

00:03:47
So you can hear as I get up into the sort of 7 or 8 range on the distortion that's really starting to ring and that is kind of the type of artifact you would get with analog distortion as well, that sort of clipping.

00:03:59
You might ask: 'why would you wanna clip a kick drum?' For me, a little bit of that clipping is harmonic distortion, it's exactly the same type of harmonic distortion you could get by running through some transformers and tubes, like going through an LA-2A that isn't compressing, going through a tape machine that isn't recording, going through a tape machine that is recording.

00:04:19
All of those processes, because of just the nature of the analog circuitry, don't pass a perfect version of the waveform through.

00:04:27
There's some sort of distortion that happens along the way, and if you look at the word 'distortion', to distort something is to change its shape.

00:04:35
Period. It's not necessarily fuzzy guitar distortion.

00:04:39
A lot of people think about distortion as just making stuff fuzzy but all it means is you're changing the shape.

00:04:44
Technically, a fast enough compressor is distortion and we're gonna see that in a second using an 1176 to create what sounds like fuzzy distortion purely based on the fact that we're over compressing.

00:04:57
And I use distortion to create length, to create depth sonically, and it's just a sound that I really like.

00:05:05
It's not that I'm trying to recapture something that I used to get out of analog gear and I don't get in digital gear, everything has been recorded with analog gear, unless you're working from a digitally-created sample in a soft synth at one point it was analog through a microphone through at the very least a microphone preamp.

00:05:22
Probably through some EQ and a compressor.

00:05:25
All of that stuff could or could not have some harmonic distortion that goes along with it and I would use distortion on things that were recorded to tape just as often as I would use them on things recorded straight into Pro Tools.

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This is not anything to do to make up for the deficiencies in anything.

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It is just trying to make the sound more interesting.

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The more harmonic distortion you have, the more harmonic content you have and the thicker it gets.

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Now, you can obviously go too far, make a kick drum so big you don't have room for anything else in the mix, so how to use this in your own mixes is something that you've got to experiment with and play with and you really gotta learn the way different distortion works on different things, and how it works in context and that's a phrase I use constantly when talking about my mixes, but that's the most important thing.

00:06:12
But the point of this video is to say: 'well, there are a bunch of different flavors of it and let's hear what they sound like and some of these plug-ins are going to be plug-ins that are free with Pro Tools but don't exist anywhere else.

00:06:24
Some of them could be paid plug-ins that you could have in any format but the idea is there are lots of flavors of distortion and all of them could either be the perfect thing or the absolute worst thing on any source.

00:06:38
Now what I'm gonna do is just pull up another clipper in the form of Decapitator which is quite a fine clipper but it's actually one that I don't use very often and I don't know why that is, I just never really got my head around opening it up but making it sound like something I like so what we're gonna do is start with some presets so I'm just gonna roll the kick drum and we'll roll some presets and when I find something fun, then maybe we'll tweak a little bit and see what some of the individual controls do for you.

00:07:15
Ok, this is a really interesting bit of distortion, which I like quite a bit.

00:07:20
I would assume that the 'Punish' knob is pushing the gain knob internally in the circuit to give you more clipping but then it's also changing something about the knee of the clipping, 'cause this is always much brighter then if you just used the 'Drive' circuit.

00:07:32
But, what this is doing is giving you something which almost sounds like Lo-Fi reverb as well as distortion.

00:07:39
Let me bypass this a couple of times and check it out and you can get an idea of what this distortion is doing just see what each of the individuals controls is doing.

00:08:00
One thing to keep in mind: you hear how much louder the snare is.

00:08:03
This is an artifact of any time you're distorting anything by using dynamics or clipping, which is basically the hardest wall limiter you've ever used in your life.

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You're pushing the signal up against the ceiling and then stuff is getting shaved off, which means that the dynamic range is starting to get less and less and less the more you clip so what's really cool about this sound is how long and grainy the kick drum is but you can also hear how much the snare comes up so now the snare bleed in the kick mic and this is the inside kick mic, is gonna be part of the snare sound. So again, you've got to listen in context but this is a very cool sound so now, what I'm gonna do is start messing with the tone and the high cut and you'll see how much of the really nasty part of this distortion this preset is getting rid of.

00:08:52
And how much they had to push it to get the really cool distortion that's there.

00:09:15
So as I moved the tone around you can see how the resonance changes and you can get this weird sort of midrange but if you move it high enough you're into the place where you don't have any ringing tones in the drums and you're just getting that great, grainy kind of extension to the sound.

00:09:32
You also hear how invasive in terms of the sound of this the distortion is, which is quite cool but what if you only wanna blend that in: well you could set this up on a send if you wanted multiple sources to go it, you could duplicate the track and then make it inactive on one of them and just change the level or - if you're using Decapitator - there's actually a Wet/Dry mix.

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If I pull this all the way to 'Dry' we're gonna have our clean kick drum, same as bypassing.

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All the way 'Wet' is 100% wet but then you can dial it in so let's check that out.

00:10:18
Just gives you a little bit of it, lemme go through and get one more preset on here which is gonna sound different: 'High Crispy Mix' so let's see what this guy does to a kick drum.

00:10:47
This is much more of a traditional clipper, it's different than the Lo-Fi but this is really using a clipper as EQ so what you're getting back is a lot of top end but you're keeping the transient of the kick drum especially when we're mixed about I don't know, 60-70% it looks like, This is another way to use distortion, you can actually just get top end because any time a waveform moves quickly, that's high frequency information that makes it do it, so if you think about the difference between a sine wave and a square wave, the square wave is turning corners much faster than a sine wave and the way it does that is by having upper harmonics, which are higher frequencies than the fundamental.

00:11:25
The more high frequencies you have the tighter a corner a waveform can go.

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Which means, if you make a waveform have sharper corners then you must be introducing high frequency content and that's what clipping does.

00:11:37
Which is why it's so awesome! Let's move on to a different way of implementing something on a kick drum.

00:11:44
In this session, 'cause it's part of my template, I've got something called the Devil-Loc, down here, which is a very distorted compressor.

00:11:52
The original Shure Level-Loc was built as a microphone level compressor and it was actually built for department stores, for PA systems so that someone could hit a little button be 25 feet away from the microphone and yell: 'Clean up in Isle 3!' And that would be the same level as somebody who had really good mic technique and got right up on the mic to tell you about the Blue Light Special in Isle 2.

00:12:14
So, Chad Blake, famously, has used this to record drums quite a bit. He would still a microphone on the floor, in-between the kick and snare and then put it through the Level-Loc and just destroy it on the way in and it's an amazing sound so, this model is of that compression circuit but getting line level inputs. It's a different thing but it's still a super distorted compressor and I've got it setup on a send in my session, there's a little gate before and this is just to get rid of bleed so I only have the transients of the kick and snare going into it, because it's a very, very dirty compressor which means it brings up all of the noise in-between so while it's a really cool distortion, sometimes you need some to use some traditional dynamics tools to tame either what's going into it or what's coming out of it so let's see what happens if I have this going on my kick in this session and it's going on parallel.

00:13:24
So you can hear it's a lot like second preset that we had on Decapitator, you're picking up a lot of top end but you're not necessarily picking up a lot of what seems like distortion.

00:13:33
Now what we're gonna do is hear the Devil-Loc but it's a very different character because there is actually dynamics processing as well as straight up distortion.

00:13:58
It's not subtle, at all, and what the differences between this and the Decapitator is what happens in-between the transients.

00:14:05
And you just need to play with the controls on this, there's a slow and a fast release, there's how much crush vs how much crunch, one on them is actually a distortion circuit one of them is a serious brickwall limiter that's set with very, very fast attack and release times so that you can get distortion as you start to cross the threshold.

00:14:23
All three of those sort of give you different characters on a kick drum, one being subtle and two of them being pretty full on so let me get rid of that send off to the Devil-Loc and let's look at one other type of distortion which is really, just basic tape emulation and I'm gonna use the Phoenix for this, where this is harmonic distortion and it's just meant to emulate the kind of harmonic distortion you get when you hit tape.

00:14:49
If you push it really hard you start to get some of the dynamics processing that happens on tape as well, there is a huge amount of compression that can happen on tape especially on the low mids, low end depending on how hard you hit it but this is really just supposed to be about the harmonic distortion which is really the inability of tape to properly play things back.

00:15:09
Don't think of it as magic sauce, think about it as stuff that's wrong about tape that can sometimes sound awesome.

00:15:16
This is 'things that are broken'.

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There are five different flavors of this harmonic distortion that are built in, these are basically five variations on a model and they respond differently across the frequency spectrum to different levels, that's basically how they're described in the manual.

00:15:35
Then you can also decide: well, do you wanna affect mostly the low frequencies with Opal, the full frequency spectrum with Gold and the top frequencies with Sapphire, I'm gonna leave this in Gold mode, just to get the most out of it.

00:15:47
'cause we're not looking for subtle, here, we're looking for you guys to be able to hear what's going on, so I'm gonna show you this Phoenix plug-in on kick and snare.

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I'm gonna take off all of the other parallel stuff that's going, I'm gonna mute sends to parallel compressors here, so that we're really just hearing the dry kick and snare going through this Phoenix plug-in.

00:16:20
So you can hear on Luminescent mode that we're basically a slightly cleaner version of the Lo-Fi plug-in. It's a little bit of clipping, a little bit of length, a little bit of top end, now I'm gonna switch over to Dark Essence, which is the furthest away from this, this should start pushing the low end a little bit more.

00:16:52
So you can hear this is a lot more aggressive with the kick but it's not fundamentally changing the sound and this is what a lot of the tape emulation plug-ins will do if you don't push them too hard and this includes any of the Waves or UAD actual emulations of tape machines but what those have the added bonus of doing and let's just pull one of those up, real quick, let's do the Studer 800! One of the benefits of using an actual tape emulation plug-in as opposed to something that's just giving tape harmonic distortion is they've given you the controls for the tape machine and you can screw it up you can actually make it much more distorted than tape ever would have, because you never would have misaligned your tape machine, this much.

00:17:32
So, now I'm gonna go ahead and give you that same kick and snare and I'm gonna start actually distorting the tape machine.

00:18:20
You can hear how far you can go just with tape emulation, now, yes: we are clipping a plug-in but unless the plug-in is really badly set up it's set up so that when I start cranking my record level it's gonna start distorting inside the plug-in's model of the tape machine as opposed to just clipping the output of the plug-in. So this is very much ultra tape saturation as well as clipping the electronics of the tape machine itself.

00:18:46
Now I'm gonna call one other tape emulation program that has an even odder way that you can tweak.

00:18:52
So here's one more tape emulation plug-in called Satin and this actually has even more control where you can misalign the head stack you can change the head bump, which is a low frequency bump because of the gap in the head.

00:19:06
I'm gonna start completely misaligning this tape machine and you'll hear how completely messed up it can get.

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I'll bypass this and I'm what's going on down here in this frequency response curve.

00:20:12
You can hear it's actually starting to pull stuff out of the drums and what's happening is I'm using this azimuth control which is doing the equivalent of tilting the playback head so now in comb filtering the output of the head, because different frequencies are at different amount of out of phase because the head's laying slanted this away, so as the tape goes across different frequencies are out by a different amount based on the physical problem on the tape head..

00:20:41
..which..

00:20:42
..actually is an issue sometimes when you're using tape machines. You can have someone align a tape machine at too high a frequency and they can be one cycle off at 10k.

00:20:52
But that means they're in phase at 10k but they're half a cycle out at 5k.

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And it can cause all kinds of really weird frequency response stuff, so..

00:21:01
..that's a totally different way to think about distorting your signal.

00:21:03
'cause again: just changing it is distorting it.

00:21:06
So you can do straight up just overdrive but you can also just misuse the hardware completely even though it's just an emulation of the hardware.

00:21:14
You've seen how many different flavors of distortion are just for kick or kick and snare and now you might be thinking: 'ok, but..

00:21:21
..so what do I do with this knowledge?' And the answer is: I really have no idea, but..

00:21:28
..here's the point: you can either use distortion, let's say like that first preset I called up on Decapitator, because you're going after a very particular sound that old-school '70s sound, it's a very well-named preset, it's a really good-sounding one, so it could be that you're stylistically trying to find a specific sound but more often than not when I'm distorting drums I'm doing it because I need the drum kit to do something and it's not quite doing it, yet.

00:21:55
And the obvious tools for me would be parallel compression or direct insert equalization.

00:22:01
And I use that quite a bit.

00:22:02
But there could also be something that distortion can help me with and I can only find that out by experimenting and the biggest mistake you can get is to mess around with the drums in solo and say: 'Oh, man! Now, that's awesome!' And then assume it's gonna work with everything else.

00:22:19
If you're doing stuff, especially if it's subtle, you've got to make sure that it's better in the context of the full mix with, then without.

00:22:26
So, when you're learning to do this don't let yourself just go down one path: do one thing that you think it's good, bypass it and do a second thing that you think it's good.

00:22:36
Then put all your other instruments in and see which one's better and what you'll do is you'll start to recognize what stuff should sound like when you have it soloed so so that it's going to work in the context of the whole mix and unfortunately there's no magic formula for that.

00:22:50
That's just practice.

00:22:51
So, the more you practice, the better off you are and if you think about it distort the kick three different ways on one mix and you've just practiced three times instead of one. So..

00:22:59
..I would say: at the beginning, vary your tools and always check stuff in context to make sure it's better.

00:23:05
And by better I mean it feels better, the groove is better, the song is more fun to listen to, it doesn't distract your from the vocal. That's pretty much what I'm looking for when I'm thinking about 'better'.

00:23:15
I don't even know what it sounds like, it doesn't matter.

00:23:18
Let's move on to bass, 'cause it happens to be next in my session.

00:23:21
I've got a little bit of EQ on it, which actually let's just get rid of that.

00:23:25
This is what the bass sounds like: There's a little bit of dirt going on but it's not that dirty. So the first thing is, let's do some insert distortion.

00:23:41
One of the first places I would think of going would be Sansamp, it comes with Pro Tools, it's one of the first modeling plug-ins done, it was part of the original Bomb Factory bundle, it's also great hardware.

00:23:53
The thing about Sansamp you need to be aware of is, if after watching this whole video you say: 'Yeah, I'm gonna use Sansamp I'm gonna use it parallel and do all this' 'cause you're gonna be such a master of all the different ways to do this..

00:24:03
because of all the different distortion circuits there are lots of different crossover circuits inside of this model which means it isn't phase coherent if you use it parallel.

00:24:12
If you set it up on a send and blend it at the same relative level as your dry signal it will start to suck out certain frequencies.

00:24:20
That might be ok. It's not necessarily a terrible thing but you need to be aware of it.

00:24:24
Which makes it very hard to use on vocals unless it's a crazy distorted effect at which point there is really no correlation between the original signal and the distorted signal but if you're doing something subtle and then try to blend it in Sansamp could actually be a little bit of an issue.

00:24:41
Just wanted to point that out.

00:24:42
What's cool about Sansamp is it's got one, two, three, four.. count them four completely different saturation circuits, it's got low and high tone controls then it's got a preamp control which just is overall level into the distortion and then an output level control so very, very simple, but very versatile.

00:25:02
First of all, let's hear what the factory presets sound like, on bass.

00:25:21
So you can hear it's a little bit dirtier, it's not that much different. Now, I'm just gonna start cranking around on this controls while it's playing and you'll hear how many different types of distortion there are. And in fact, why don't I do this: I'll just do one at the time, basically.

00:25:34
I'm gonna pull down the drive, the crunch and the punch and I'm gonna set the preamp and the buzz 'till I start getting a lot of the buzz, so you can hear that.

00:25:58
Now, contrary to popular belief 'Buzz', it turns out, is actually focusing more on the low and the low mids so lemme take the buzz out and let's do the 'Punch'.

00:26:07
And then, what you're gonna see is: it's not as simple as having four distortion chains and then just blending them, they all interact and they do all kinds of stuff so I'll show you individually, I'm not gonna stop to talk, anymore. Just watch the knobs go and then I'm gonna start blending them and you'll see that you can create so many different bass tones just within the one plug-in.

00:27:35
Pretty awesome. It does a lot, it's definitely worth playing with and it's free if you use Pro Tools! Which is a great thing.

00:27:41
If you don't use Pro Tools it's very hard to have this plug-in, so let me just pull up another stomp box one.

00:27:47
Here is another distortion plug-in called the Fabfilter Saturn.

00:27:51
I have never actually used this plug-in, before and this is what is awesome about plug-ins..

00:27:57
is: you don't go out and buy a huge amount of hardware and then hope you can figure it out.

00:28:02
You download the demo of a plug-in and you check it out for 30 days or maybe it beeps at you or gets some white noise bursts, whatever it is there're very, very few plug-ins that you can't check out, first. So, let's check out Saturn.

00:28:14
It has lots of different modes, it has a tone section which I like quite a bit.

00:28:19
It's got feedback, I don't even know what that's gonna do but it's gonna be awesome.

00:28:23
And let's see what we can do to our bass! Come on! Who doesn't like that! That's awesome.

00:29:30
So obviously you can get some very extreme effects, here, which is what I am going for about doing this video, 'cause for me to just keep showing you subtle stuff, that's ridiculous, we're gonna put the 'B' back in subtle in all of this but let me show you a more sort of traditional tool which would be using just a straight up bass amp simulator. So I'm gonna call up the UAD Ampeg SVT, which is an amp that a lot of people have used over the years, it's a great amplifier and not only does it do harmonic distortion just by being an amp model but you can also get in to a bit of drive, here, not as much as on a lot of guitar simulators but you can actually pick up some distortion, here.

00:30:08
Let's just start hitting buttons and see what happens! You can see, you can get pretty nasty on this and just get sort of a nice amp tone and you'll hear the difference between an amp simulator and no amp simulator on this particular bass track. Not necessarily that it needs it but that, how you can subtly change things with distortion that will just sort of change the feel and this type of change is like the Lo-Fi on the kick and snare, it's a lot more subtle and it's a lot more about how it's going to work with the rest of the instrument. So, in solo, it's not necessarily the most directly informative thing, but just to get an idea of how it can change and listen instead of listening for the amount of distortion on the bass, listen for things like the length of the bloom of the notes and sort of how much room tone it sounds like you're getting and how far away it sounds like the mics are, something like that.

00:32:08
Now, this is something which could be good actually parallel. So let me make a quick copy of this track and I'm gonna kill on the Ampeg on the first one.

00:32:18
What I've done is build just sort of a boom track for the bass without using a crossover, just using the EQ on the amplifier itself and let's see what this sounds like being blended in.

00:32:50
By using some harmonic shaping and EQ on the amp I'm actually creating a track that sounds like the size of the room the bass amp was in.

00:32:59
What this starts to sound like to me is bleed of the bass into other microphones which can be a really great sound, actually and if you've got a really sparse track like, let's say the drums are very, very quite here just a couple of hits and fills, by bringing this sort of boom on a bass you can give the impression of everybody tracking in a room, even if that's not the case.

00:33:19
Let's move away from bass and let's go to guitar! I've got some acoustic guitar so let's turn them into really nasty electric guitars, 'cause that's always fun.

00:33:39
What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start with the Sansamp again only because it's gonna show you how different it sounds with different input.

00:34:12
You might be saying: 'Well, ok, fine.. you just distorted an acoustic guitar and it sounds like a distorted acoustic guitar.' But what it can be really good for is, you could layer some of this underneath a clean acoustic guitar when you get to the chorus of the song.

00:34:25
And it lets you still have that strum but instead of having the strum, the sound of the pick on the strings and no notes anymore because you've got cymbals and electric guitars to go along with it, you actually give the acoustic guitar some sustain.

00:34:39
Here: I'll make a copy. One again, just the quickest way to do it.

00:34:42
Get rid of this and I'm gonna start blending in the distorted acoustic guitar.

00:35:07
There are a million things you could on acoustic guitars or cleaner guitars but it's all about what's gonna be appropriate for the song, so all the same tools you saw on the drums and on the bass, they could work, they might not work, find something else..

00:35:19
..but what about if you've already got a distorted guitar and the way it's distorted isn't really working for you? Well, if you're lucky you've also got the guitar DI and then you can start from scratch and reamp, basically using plug-ins, using emulations, using some of the stuff I've already used here on this particular song, the guitar was fine, but here's a chorus distorted guitar..

00:35:49
It's very dirty and it's very mid-rangey so let's say that that was inappropriate. Now, the first thing you can do is actually you can do quite a bit with EQ.

00:35:59
I'm gonna use an EQ3, because it's a very simple EQ to use but it also has a great feature which the Fabfilter has, which Massenburg has, where you can solo the band of the EQ to find the frequency you're looking for, it turns it into a bandpass so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna search for that really boxy frequency and then we're gonna suck a little bit of that out and then we're gonna add some low end and see if we can kind of revoice the distortion.

00:36:52
And then I'm gonna go looking for some of that fizz that's up top, I'm turning my high frequency band into a parametric band, then I'm gonna see if I can find some of the fizz.

00:37:14
Now, I'm not saying I necessarily like that better but I just really changed the character of the distortion.

00:37:20
You can also do this with other EQs, let's just add some EQ to it and I'll do that with a Helios model.

00:37:27
I'm gonna add some resonance using the low-frequency circuit at either 60 or 120 which should give me a little bit of cabinet thump and then I'm gonna actually accentuate the boxiness of it and you'll see how much of that will change the distortion.

00:38:02
It's a much more ringing, open distortion as opposed to this sort of more closed, box distortion.

00:38:07
Now, let's see what it sounds like to put the Sansamp on top of this because it is a tool that's voiced in a lot of different ways for distortion so it's a really good way to just mess around with different types of distortion, you'll hear that it is possible to completely revoice the distortion on something to a point without having to go back to a cleaner version of it.

00:38:58
So you can see I made it smaller, I'm bringing out more of the sound of the strings, the fizz is almost completely gone and now this would be more of like a little small combo amp recorded a couple of feet away.

00:39:09
That sort of sound as opposed to the original.

00:39:11
And you can also just do some subtle shaping.

00:39:14
Lemme put a Lo-Fi on this and you'll hear the effect of just a tiny bit of clipping on top of a clipped signal and again this might be counter-intuitive but you're gonna get some gain as well but this will help this guitar actually poke through the mix, the same way a Phoenix would or Heat, or any of the just straight-up harmonic distortion.

00:39:31
Tapehead is another great one from Massey.

00:39:44
Each of the attacks of the strum has a little more decay that separates the strum form the steady state distortions.

00:39:51
So, listen to that again as I bypass it. And again this is only on .2.

00:40:09
There are two sort of very broad categories of distortion: one would be the 'I'm mixing and I need some subtle sound-shaping things' and then the other would be: 'I'm creating a sound using the distortion'.

00:40:23
So, let's go ahead and move on to some vocals.

00:40:26
And you can hear the crazy effects we can actually make with vocals.

00:40:30
Just gonna use four bars of the lead vocal, here, I don't even know what the lyric is, I don't know what the song is doing at this particular point, I don't even care.

00:40:39
And what we're gonna do is I'm gonna start with some inserts just on the vocal itself and I'm gonna use the same stuff we've been using so let's start with Lo-Fi.

00:41:10
Subtle but again: it makes it have a little more energy, it's adding that little bit of top end as we go through the clipper, it's also bringing the level up which is not necessarily a bad thing, it's hitting some compression more downstream, but that's that exact same sort of subtle harmonic boost that you get out of Lo-Fi.

00:41:29
Now, let's pop on a Decapitator because that's another one that's around a lot.

00:41:34
And we'll just flip through some presets there, as well.

00:41:59
That might be not appropriate for that part of the song but that's just a little bit of clipping but it's a much more obvious clipping, there's a lot more top end to that and let's check out 'MildTubeVox' and see what that does.

00:42:28
We're picking up some dynamics control because we're clipping and that just comes along with it but you can hear the difference between the preset before and the preset we're listening to now, that one before was emphasizing top end, almost fizz, whereas this is really emphasizing the sort of low mid push of the vocal so the vocal is actually resonating.

00:42:49
Which to me sounds to me more like a tube distortion with a little bit of feedback, that kind of thing.

00:42:54
Just listen to the bottom of the vocal, again.

00:43:06
For me that's not the kind of distortion I like on vocals but is used quite often. So, it's just another way you can get it.

00:43:13
Now I'm gonna show you how you can distort a vocal using nothing other than a compressor.

00:43:20
'cause why not! So the first thing is, you put the compressor out of spec by using the 'all-buttons in' mode, and what it does is it changes the time constants to something where you're basically gonna start distorting.

00:43:32
I have the most luck with the attack down here and the release here but we can play with it while the vocal's playing and as I push the input we'll actually get some clipping, 'cause I'm actually clipping the circuit inside of the plug-in that's been modeled but we're also just gonna be hitting that threshold and the dynamics control part of the circuit, a lot harder, so you're gonna hear quite a bit of distortion coming as we push this, too.

00:44:31
It's more of a subtle effect, but this can really help bring the vocal forward in the mix so this is one, again, to listen to in context but be aware with all of this added gain you're gonna start bringing up breaths and little lip smacks and all of the small noises within the vocal so you've gotta be a lot more careful.

00:44:49
You can always just put a gate in front of this and that will only let the vocal through when it's at a certain level, so if you're fine loosing some details then you can use this sort of dynamics distortion but go ahead and keep track of the noise.

00:45:03
So now let's do something that is much less subtle.

00:45:07
What I'm gonna do now is I've got a send, here, and lemme make sure that that send is not gonna get muted by automation.

00:45:16
And this is to a spread, so this is sort of a straight micropitch/slap effect that I use and it's a Dual 910 down here but I have a placeholder in my template to put a Sansamp in front of it.

00:45:33
On screaming lead! That's really over the top, as I pull that down you're gonna hear it starts to blend into the background and inside of a mix you can get away a lot more of this than you can think.

00:45:55
And it is a very cool effect because not only is it distortion but because it's slightly pitch-shifted and slightly delayed, it's also incredibly stereo.

00:46:05
So it leaves your dry vocal alone, whether you've distorted it or not, in the middle, and then adds this cloud of vocal out to the sides. Now, it also makes your mix very thick, it's harder to hear guitars but it can be a really cool effect.

00:46:17
And for a great example of this sort of effect check out a lot of the Deftones stuff, I think they're the masters of it.

00:46:24
But this is the kind of effect this is.

00:46:40
That's an over-the-top distortion used subtly to give you an effect but it leaves your main vocal alone.

00:46:46
And now, really quickly, lemme just show you distorting a mix, 'cause why not? Let's go ahead and put some Lo-Fi on this mix.

00:46:53
I'm gonna play a bit of the verse which should be quiet and then we'll check that out! So you've seen that there are tons of different types of distortion, different ways to think about distortion and certainly different ways to create distortion and don't forget that we've only looked at, I don't know, six plug-ins, here? There are so many other ways that you can distort things: every microphone preamp will distort if you push it hard enough and that's a really buzzy distortion that can be cool..

00:47:38
..there're lots of different amp simulators, there're guitar pedals.

00:47:41
There's everything, so: my advice to you is go out and distort! But then listen in context to make sure you haven't just ruined the song.

00:47:50
But have fun and be creative and most of all: be awesome.