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Dirty up your dance
From nu-rave to tech-funk and chillout, an increasing number of artists are rejecting the flawless perfection offered by digital production to distort, overdrive and bit-crush their sounds beyond recognition. Jono Buchanan gets dirty
Musicians and producers have been distorting sounds for decades. In the beginning it was guitar players, overdriving an amp’s vacuum tubes. Overloading the amp's valve component results in a pleasing, lower mid-range warmth. Harder treatments provide bite and crunch.
The two most common controls on a distortion or overdrive effect (hardware or software) are tone, which lets you decide the frequency range over which your effect will work its magic and gain, which lets you dial in the amount of drive you want at this spot.
Bit-crushing is a different effect that lets you reduce the ‘quality’ of the sound. CD quality audio is represented by a sample rate of 16-bits at a sample frequency of 44.1kHz. Bit-crushers let you dramatically reduce the resolution of a sound so that rather than hearing a full frequency image of that sound, its playback is deliberately restricted - either to the classic 8-bit sound of early drum machines (like the MPC60) or lower still to 2 or 4-bit filth.
Overdrive and distortion can provide anything from warm tape-like saturation effects to an almost complete break-down in audio signal quality. So, whether you’re drawn to the chop-and-change mayhem of Justice, the downbeat hard edges of Burial or the biting square-wave basslines of dubstep, distortion will be a key production tool. Not sure how? Here are 10 things to help you dig for dirt:
Effects pedals
Guitarists have been using pedals since the year dot but many producers overlook them in favour of plug-ins. From a convenience point of view this is understandable, but nothing matches the real-time immediacy of being able to stamp on a pedal and wreak havoc over elements of your mix - not to mention the analogue warmth you'll be injecting into your mix. Many of the French Nu-Rave gang are fans of the stomp-box classics and you can pick them up cheaply on eBay and in many guitar shops.
Overdrive tone
Remember, distortion doesn’t just let you dial in the amount of drive you want. Most distortion plug-ins contain several parameters, including a Tone dial. Once you’ve chosen the frequency spectrum for your effect, you can either get your basses booming or your leads searing. Have a waggle and keep your ears open. A subtle overdrive on a bassline can introduce pleasing new higher frequency harmonics, bulking it up and helping it sit in the mix.
Light and shade
You can only appreciate the loud if there’s soft. Making every aspect of your mix distorted won’t produce the hard, edgy sound you’re after. Instead, the sonic result will be a painful mess. Choose the mix elements you want to distort carefully and there’ll be real power in the result.
Distorted delay
If you like your dry sound but want to introduce a little distortion to add some colour, set up an auxiliary bus with a delay first, followed by the distortion plug-in of your choice. What you’ll get as a result is your original signal with a distorted echo following a little later. Clock the delay tempo to that of your track and you’re away.
EQ to taste
If you have a sound that is already edgy to which you want to bring a little more bite, you may find that EQ is the best tool to use. Find the frequencies that are providing the bite and give them a boost. Be careful if you find yourself boosting between 1kHz and 2kHz as your listeners' ears will soon tire.
Vocals
Most producers reserve their distortion and overdrive plug-ins for guitars and synth parts but there’s nothing to stop you using them on vocals too. This will add drive, crunch and an instant ‘metal’ effect a la Underworld's Born Slippy. If you like the idea but trying this produces too dominant an effect, set your distortion up on an auxiliary channel and feed just a little of your vocal to it.
Drums
Drum parts can benefit too and many dedicated drum plug-ins now allow you to get down and dirty within the host GUI. Consider the crunch possibilities within instruments such as BFD2 and Battery 3. Whether you’re after big beat, ‘real’ drums, or dirtier than usual house beats, you’ll find a little can go a long way here. Particular candidates might be a bit-crusher on hi-hats to add a sleazy edge or an overdrive on the snare to give it more balls.
Automated bit-crushers
One great way to keep your distortion alive is to automate its parameters, so that the resulting sound is constantly changing. This can be particularly effective with bit-crushers. By altering the sample rate and the level of downsampling (plus any additional parameters your particular plug-in might have), you can create anything from gentle tape-like hiss, to full on destruction from one bar to the next. This technique can sound awesome on lead synth lines, with automatation changing the bit rate for each note, or each bar. Because each bit rate introduces new tonal characterisitics the result will be a riff that chnages wildly from one bar to the next.
Soft-synth sleaze
Plenty of synths offer their own distortion or overdrive dials and frequently these create a very different sound to working with other native or third-party plug-ins to create the same type of effect. Within Logic, for instance, both the baby ES M and more complex ES 2 synths have distortion dials that warm up the sound within the signal path. Often these can create a tighter, more integrated sound.
Be creative
Try to bring distortion, overdrive and bitcrushing effects to unusual aspects of your mix. There’s nothing to stop you adding these tricks to innocuous little production elements with magical results. Don’t reserve the big guns just for the stand-out elements of your track. By mixing things up, you could strike gold.
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Jono Buchanan is a composer, producer, lecturer and music technology journalist. He's equally likely to be found composing for TV and radio, working on songs and productions for a wide variety of artists, giving lectures to undergraduate students at London's Guildhall School of Music & Drama or penning reviews and tutorials for Future Music and Computer Music.
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