Distorted Realities
Mar 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Peter Wetherbee
Not just for heavy guitar, distortion flows everywhere through the world of music; learn to use it like a warm breeze or an icy storm
FUZZ ON THE SOFT SIDE
Of course, we can always crank up any mic preamps, compressors, input trims, etc., to the max to achieve some kind of overdrive fuzz, and sometimes that is exactly what's needed for a quick guitar or synth part to sound as grungy as you want it. But the quality of distortion tones varies greatly depending on circuit design and components. Also, distortion aficionados talk about greater levels of detail, including even- or odd-order harmonics, pre-drive highpass or lowpass filters and the characteristics of traditional tube vs. transistor gear. For all of that, once again we return to tools that simulate distortion, which were developed over the years for guitarists.
If you use guitar stompboxes, you typically need to roll off some of the highs in order to keep your distortion tones from fuzzing out too much. Back in the days of stompbox evolution, some very popular fuzz boxes of the '70s, such as the MXR Dist+ and the Electro-Harmonix Big Muff, were trumped by the Pro Co Rat, which introduced a single filter knob. One of my favorite distortion boxes of the '90s was the SansAmp GT, which emulates Marshalls, Fenders and Boogies in one box, with selectable emulations of three types of mic placements in front of a virtual speaker. The SansAmp has a buffered input that will accept a wide range of signal levels, which you can run directly into the board or as an insert effect; its speaker emulations are that close to the real thing.
Nowadays, there are so many emulations of every kind of amplifier/speaker/microphone combination ever recorded that it quickly becomes overwhelming, but if you have access to the great Line 6 emulations or a plug-in like IK Multimedia Amplitube, you might be surprised at how good some of those presets sound on your drum and synth tracks that need a little oomph. (See audio examples 11 through 19.)
One great thing about fuzz-type overdrive distortion is that when you run just about any sound through a very subtle amount of it, you get a lot of tiny fractal edges that make other effects sparkle farther down the signal path. Just a tiny bit of grit on a simple orchestra or jazz instrument gives it a patina that takes a flanger sweep and makes it sparkle. (See audio examples 20 through 21.)
RICH ACOUSTICS
You can find distortion employed everywhere in music. The classic sound of the Hammond Organ relies heavily on the overdrive of the tube amplification in Leslie cabinets, and without that grit, it just doesn't sound like soul music. The African mbira is a thumb piano that benefits greatly from being attached to a resonant gourd with bottle caps nailed to it, which creates a buzzing texture to enhance the mbira's tone. That enharmonic noise component brings to mind another kind of textural distortion, found in the family of instruments loosely categorized as flutes.
Whether we're talking about Mozart or Native American, Indian classical, ancient indigenous wood or bamboo flutes from any continent, flutes by nature employ an intrinsic “noise” component as a result of blowing air over a hole (as opposed to into a sealed mouthpiece like on a trumpet). The richness of a flute's tone is directly related to that nontonal rush of air that is a big chunk of broadband noise, related closer to wind howling or water rushing over a waterfall than to anything flute players do with their fingers to create specific notes.
Synth programmers use similar noise sources to add texture and richness to a patch and as a source for filtering and modulating into something sweet and tasty. Adding harmonic distortion to a flute sound will have a different result than adding more enharmonic noise, but the result may even be more musically pleasing. Overdriving a flute sound will add harmonically saturated overtones that are directly related to the notes of the source material and that can evolve the sound into something that makes your ears perk up. (See audio examples 22 through 25.)
A distorted guitar tone always sounds “louder” than a clean tone, as a result of factors including both nonlinear psychoacoustic perceptive processes and preconceptions of how a distorted guitar tone is created (cranking up an amp), which can make a listener think, “it must be loud to sound like that.” Overdriven sounds evoke both subconscious and cognitive responses in the listener, above and beyond the richness of resulting harmonic saturation. Along the same lines, studio sessions — that may sound great at high volumes through studio monitors pushed to their limits — may sound smaller and tamer in the mastering facility because part of what the artist heard during recording and mixing was aided by distortion occurring in the monitor amplifiers themselves.
During my days working for Bill Laswell in the '90s, I was fortunate to attend many mastering sessions with Howie Weinberg at Masterdisk in NYC. Weinberg had a few surprising tricks up his sleeves in the midst of his hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of ultrahigh-end mastering EQs, converters and compressors. Sometimes he would run finished mixes through the most seemingly incongruous pieces of gear that he had, a couple of old Pultec EQs — often without any actual EQ settings engaged — to simply warm up mixes that came in sounding too clean, brittle and digital.
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