Controlling distortion

Distortion can be great for adding energy to your mix, and in this masterclass, we’re focusing on applying it to specific sounds

- Jon Musgrave

Jon Musgrave

Jon is a London-based platinum award winning mixer, producer, composer and club remixer with a diverse CV that spans dance, pop, rock and music for media. He's also a long term contributor to Computer Music. Jon usually handles final mixdowns, which is why we've got him to share some of his pearls of mixing wisdom here

Much of the time we try to avoid audible distortion, but there are plenty of situations where adding it in a controlled manner can be very fruitful.

But first, a quick word about definitions. From a technical perspective audio distortion is any process that brings about a change in an audio waveform. It’s a broad definition that can include compression and soft clipping as well as more obvious effects such as overdrive, fuzz and so on.

Nevertheless, when we talk about creative uses for distortion more often than not we mean a process that generates audible harmonics. This could simply be adding subtle saturation or enhancing vocals (both of which we’ll cover in individual masterclasses), but could equally be a very audible featured distortion effect.