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.
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 expectation of what a finished track should sound like. That goes for most genres and most styles, from quiet and mellow to loud and aggressive. Because of the history of recording with lo-fi equipment, we've come to expect things to sound fat and compressed.
That also ties into how our minds interpret 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, and overly dynamic. In a real-world situation, our brains naturally equalize levels and balance frequencies to make interpretation easier.
So 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. Distortion, in more cases than not, is exactly what can solve this.
Why Distortion Is Everywhere in Music Production
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. A big part of the pull toward analog gear like EQs, compressors, and large consoles is the specific type of distortion and saturation they impart on a sound. It's a desirable sound in production, and a common method shared by most producers.
But can distortion really help in any situation and make any source better? Almost any. And before you run your drum machines through a fuzz pedal — although that might sound very cool — that's not the type of thing being pushed for here.
Here's 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 can be difficult to get loud enough or thick enough. In most cases, that has to do with the transients being too loud and the sustain 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 too wide. When the peaks are hitting zero, we're still not hearing the sound as particularly loud or powerful.
Hit those drums with some distortion and the peaks get reduced or cut off, harmonics get introduced above the fundamental tone, and the sustain gets louder. The result is a fatter sound, less subtle, more powerful, and better able to cut through a mix of layered sounds. This effect translates just as well to many other instruments and 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 and get a great result without completely breaking a sound the way a high-gain guitar would.
Types of Distortion and What They Do
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 tone, 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, and adds what you might call 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 approach to distortion where 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. The warm, fuzzy breakup that happens when a circuit is pushed. A bit more aggressive than saturation, but still musical.
Note: predicting exactly how any one signal will be audibly affected is difficult. These are useful starting points, but experimentation is always part of the process.
What People Mean by "Color"
Color, when it comes to manipulating the tone and shape of a sound, is simply adding distortion and saturation. There are many different ways this breakdown of waveforms can take place, and even more analog or digital devices to make it happen, each with its own varying color.
You can, and should, be using all of those available coloration methods to set the tone and emotion of your tracks. 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 a song to another — that's where things get really interesting.
Things to Keep in Mind
Adding distortion to sounds in the low end 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. Keep this in mind when balancing tone between different sounds.
In the top end, with hi-hats and shakers, distortion has a numbing effect on transient sounds that can actually be the perfect solution for taming very sharp percussion. Combined with the gentle roll-off of extreme high frequencies that comes with tape-style saturation, distortion becomes a useful tool for mastering or final mix touches. It mellows out excessive peaks in the highs and gives a tucked-in overall balance.
Creative Ideas to Try
A few things worth experimenting with next time you're in a session:
- •Go wild with saturation on certain sounds or vocals, but in parallel, keeping the mix knob low.
- •Distort lower mids and upper highs with a multiband saturator on the mix bus for a louder, more impactful sound.
- •Distort reverbs, especially on drums, for a blown-up, larger-than-life effect.
- •Add distortion after a send delay effect for a powerful, otherworldly result.
- •Add distortion to hi-hats not to make them aggressive, but to smooth them out.
- •Use distortion to bring out the sustain in percussion elements like claps.
- •Create interludes or break sections where you distort and EQ most of the arrangement for contrast.
- •For lead sounds needing a bigger stereo image, try distorting the left or right channel only, or use different types on each side.