Distortion and Synths: an Investigative Love Letter (feat. Empress Effects)
Channel: Oscillator Sink
Date: 2022-07-16

If you’ve followed my channel for a while, you’d be well within your rights to assume that big washy ambient reverbs, or maybe delays feeding back to infinity were my favourite kinds of effects. While they’re high up in the pecking order my first and truest love will always be distortion. As far as the videos I’ve made for this channel, I feel like I might have been neglecting my number one, so today I’d like to put this right and dedicate a whole video to distortion, clipping, saturation and the like; talk about what it is, what it does, its varied flavours and how we can approach using it in the world of electronic music.

Here's a link to the PD patches from the start of the video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NeCGLCEdoxrpJsbiX-jxuOUNQWIxFyWX/view?usp=sharing

Chapters:
00:00 - Intro
00:54 - What is clipping and what does it do?
13:17 - The different flavours of distortion
18:38 - Demoing Overdrive, Distortion and Fuzz with the Minilogue
24:39 - Using VCAs + Distortion to create moving timbres
29:28 - Small changes, Big differences
30:28 - Acid time! (Distortion and 303 style basslines)
34:24 - Demoing Overdrive, Distortion and Fuzz with the Drumbrute Impact
40:35 - Distorting together vs. separately
45:07 - Using distortion to create stereo width
48:13 - Distorting 1 voice 3 different ways to fake 3 different voices
50:15 - Pre-filtering to sculpt distortion
55:22 - Limitations and considerations for distortion
58:27 - Outro

Transparency notice: Empress Effects kindly provided the three pedals used in this video, but have not had, nor have asked for any editorial oversight on any video I make with them.

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