Designer Distortion

Whether you’re looking for subtle smoothening, analogue warmth or full-blown sonic decimation, we’re on hand to help you turn up the heat…

When it comes to imbuing sterile audio signals with harmonic excitement, aggression, bite and character, there are few better effects than saturation and distortion. With so many flavours on hand, spanning subtle to searing, the ranges of tones on offer are almost infinite.

But so much sonic potential comes at a cost. Should you reach for a software emulation of a classic tape machine? Or would a glaze of retro tube distortion do a better job? And what about digital distortion and its associated aliasing artefacts? Unless you’re a bona fide analogue aficionado, the amazing hardware-emulating features packed into today’s plugins can all too easily prove overwhelming.

Yes, you can simply load up a plugin at random and overdrive your signals into oblivion – and this can often work – but such a haphazard strategy will only get you so far. Instead, understand what all those oddly named controls mean, and which process will best suit your source material, and your music-making and mixing skills will skyrocket as a result.

Thankfully, this issue’s cover feature is here to demystify the science behind these classic analogue circuits, helping you dial in delicious distortion tones in your DAW, for perfect mixes every time. Focusing on tube circuits and tape emulation tools, we’ll cover a broad range of topics, from harmonics and colour, to waveform asymmetry, intermodulation, compression sideeffects and beyond.

Analogue emulation aside, today’s advanced tools provide complicated features such as multiband modes, sidechain inputs, parallel blending, mid/side functionality and more. And that’s not even taking into account the routing flexibility of the average DAW! That’s why, later in the issue, we’ll break down a bunch of creative saturation and distortion tricks and tools you can use to spark your studio inspiration. It’s drive time…