Producer Tier: Tutorial (April)

Phase distortion synthesis was pioneered by Casio in competition with Yamaha's FM. It's a very interesting approach, essentially a sine was stored in rom and read out at varying speeds, this allows it to create a near perfect saw wave and lots of other interesting shapes as well. A low pass filter effect was added by simply modulating the delta between the new wave and the original sine. I have a CZ3000 which uses this technology, but it is also available as an Arturia softsynth, which is probably much more convenient. My keyboard is 61key, weighs a tonne and has no velocity sensitivity. I think the omission of velocity is probably a big reason why it failed to compete with the DX7. Also, all editing is done by two crappy buttons on the front and it has 10 stage envelopes. Definitely worth looking to Arturia for this one. Though I have no idea how Kilohearts is doing this in a plugin, I guess they have a buffer they are loading the sound into in real time.

David May

Thanks a lot for sharing this.

KRYTIKA

Super fascinating! So much to think about. Thanks, Professor.

Gleb Zverev

This was brilliant and so informative!! The talk on the physicality of sound was extremely thought provoking and I’m so glad you dove into that

Matthew Murphy

Great tutorial as always from Nik never looked at distortion in this way very cool !

Yung-e

That makes total sense! Thanks for the solution =)

Malte Beyer

I know what you mean, I was trying to figure out the same thing for a few days as well, the way you go around that is to not record the sound in 32 bit floating point, in whichever DAW you use you should be able to change the bit depth of resampling or recording or whatever, change it to 24 bit and now when you record stuff which is pushing into the red inside your DAW it will be captured and won't disappear when you turn the volume down! This is why I don't like working in 32 bit float point and always work with 24 bit, I don't like the infinite ceiling that it offers, I see it as more of a hurdle! Hope this helps!

This was a real ear-opener :)

1:04:56 Do you know how to capture distortion that's happening when pushing stuff into the red in a floating point DAW environment? (look at lvl of the master) How would you bake the distortion into the render? When I record that signal into another channel it will not capture the sound of the distortion. It will disappear when reducing the volume again since it depends on the sound being pushed into the red. I think you would need an actual recorder after the D/A conversion so bouncing would not work. Maybe feeding the output of the Sound Card back into the PC and grabbing and recording it on a channel in the DAW again. I like the sound that it gives a lot and haven't found a way to produce that sound with distortion FX internally on a software basis.

Malte Beyer

I think this is slowly turning into a tea drinking competition.

Jiří Nižník

Nik. If you're reading this...please consider going into formal teaching/instructing one day, even if only as a hobby. This was golden info that I never would have gotten from any of the typical sources I'd reach to.

thanks for another deep dive! love this type of content, I swear if I didn't know any better I'd think i was watching a DSP PhD candidate or something. So much knowledge, thanks for sharing. Would love to hear what your thoughts are about distortion when it comes to the context of mixing (you mentioned this at the end of the vid), hopefully you touch on that in the next vid!

DRKST DWN

Good stuff, will be reaching for the waveshaper more often and thinking more about what it is acutally doing. Thanks

Exposure A R Records

I think what you're describing is the range of processing from slow compression to waveshaping. This is all dependent on attack and release speeds. The threshold for when it'll start waveshaping (within wave cycle) depends on the pitch of whatever's going through. The lower pitch, the earlier the att/rel times will be quick enough to operate within the wavecycle. :D

VISION

Dear Nik, In this video, Gregory Scott of Kush Audio talks about how he "hears" compression, demonstrating this with relatively slow attack and release times over a drum loop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0XGXz6SHco How would you qualify the way you hear compression with in a waveshaping setting, with fast attack or release times? For example: it affects more than just one coincident or transient hit; it affects all waveform cycles in which the summed signal, which can consist of any higher frequency signal "pushed up" by the higher amplitude lower frequency singal, hits the the compressors threshold, for an sustained period of time (unlike the transient effect of a slow compressor). Also, how different is this from limiting, or from using proaudio DSM v3 limiter? sry im hi

lol

I once had an epiphany on acid where I could visualize the wave shaping/folding/physical FM involved with wind instruments. Super cool stuff.

Santino

Amazing tutorial as always, Nik!

NOTOK

Very nice tutorial Nik, thank you! If I can make a tutorial topic request: I am extremely curious about the drum synthesis in the first drop of "Get Deaded". I read it is about 5 layers of Serum. I have been practicing making drums with Serum.

FYI to clear up where I lost the plot a little about intermodulation distortion: Intermodulation distortion creates harmonics from a fundamental based on the greatest common factor of all frequencies going through it. So if one sine plays at 100 hz, and another at 125, the largest common factor is 25 (the highest number that both are dividable by is 25), so a 'tone' of 25 hz is introduced. With sines this is easy to see and track, but you can imageine that wirth more complex material the highest common factor quickly becomes very small, and musically less 'relevant'.

VISION

^

BERRIX

I would love to see a tutorial on distortion in mixing and summing in loud bass music. You said in the end that its a whole own topic and too much for this tutorial, so maybe a seperate one would be cool.

Spinform

i see what you did there

Michael

Absolutely this content is well worth the price! The information being presented is so unique and uncommonly discussed in this community. At this rate you'll be linking to papers you've published in a DSP journal as supplementary material :') . Good stuff Nik, your work is much appreciated.

Jackson Quayle

Loved it once again!

Jahfed Wismans

Thanks you again for that knowledge! This one + the bass harmonics one are fire. Can’t wait to apply on some sound design stuff. (Btw Great french accent Nik ;)

gunther

This was great but yeah, got to be distortion for mixing next month!

Nik sure likes harmonicas, would love to see you play one 😜

Rainier Albertsz

God level Wisdom once again!! Would love to see tutorials as nik says, on Distortion in mixing, and Also what role it plays in mastering, getting the extreme perceived dynamics while also getting insanely loud masters, such as on Dead Limit. :D

Douglas Mcleod

Thank you very much, Nik. very informative as always. One thing I noticed that there is a weird noise with the vocal around 14k this time. I am just curious what caused this. Sick tutorial, thank you again.

Sick lighting bro ;D

Stefan Jong

I love tutorial like this! Having an understanding of the fundamentals really helps. Thank you Nik!

Francis

maybe this would require a tutorial on stereo first, but I'd be interested to see how you apply different types of distortion to a mono bass for a song, and what changes in distortion "strategy" you employ via different plugins as stereo is applied, and finally when the sound is in it's most unctrollable state as reverbs are applied. You did touch on some of this in the reese video of course.

Bob Gibson

good one, thanks Nik 👌🏼

m00seT