Analog distortion is used creatively by musicians and recording engineers all the time.ĭoes that mean, you need to buy analog hardware to use a distortion effect, hell no! There are lots of VST plugin emulations that can act as close as possible to the real thing, and honestly, how you use them is strictly a matter of choice, just don’t overdo and trust your ears.įor example, you can use them to warm up your sound, by giving them more character and not too harsh type of sound, and you can also go the other way round, e.g creating an in-your-face, crunchy type of effect. Welcome to the world of analog distortion where it is more forgiving in how it distorts when compared to digital, the output waveforms are “rounded” when it reaches the limit. This is where I got it wrong, I was thinking in terms of digital clipping, although not bad as sometimes the DAW peak meter can be somewhat pretentious (use your ear for accurate judgment), but it gets worse when your sound is being cut off when the signal reaches 0 dBFS (full-scale) on a meter, which results in an unsmooth distortion.
![izotope trash 2 linear phase izotope trash 2 linear phase](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/APvk4d5N6ys/mqdefault.jpg)
When I first get started with music production, I wonder why some music producers would want to mess with a distortion effect in their tracks, perhaps, I initially have an understanding that there is a limit for how loud an audio signal can be, once this limit is reached, it would distort and produce an annoying, raspy, fuzzy loud sound that is unwanted for the hearing. Disclosure: When you buy through our links, we may get a commission at zero cost to you.