Beginner's Guide to Saturation

hi and welcome to this beginner's guide to saturation and let's start with the old tape saturation style in satin if I bypassed the saturation you can tell this was recorded with modern equipment [Music] dispersion is certainly more high fidelity whether sparkly atop end but does it have the same emotional impact as the saturated lis [Music] the drive level is critical in this case to high gives us obvious distortion and nasty sounding intermodulation between guitar and voice [Music] but if I set it just right we get a hint of audible distortion on the loudest notes of the vocal and we can recreate the sound of vintage recording equipment struggling to cope with the dynamic range of a really powerful voice [Music] does this sound good to me because the distortion on those loud notes helps to make them more powerful and emotive or is it a cultural thing because I associate this type of sound with the musical start either way I like it but I feel it helps to give the recording a timeless quality [Music] it has another side effect towel which we can see quite easily if we compare the clean waveform to the saturated way these files are level matched with the same integrated loudness but the clean version has visibly spiky a transients which have been shaved down and tamed in the saturated version [Music] while the clean mix might need a little limiting to get to my target loudness the saturated mix has bags of Henry probably won't need limiting at all for a more dramatic example let's take a look at the drums from the beginner's guide to distortion video the clean drum truck has pronounced transients which have been smashed off completely by the multiband distortion more subtle saturation like the tape or tube styles will round off the transients more gently replacing a little of the dynamic punch with extra harmonics that can make them sound brighter or fatter and the resulting waveform will be a little bit less spiky and a little bit less challenging for downstream dynamics processors such as compresses or limiters okay let's break out the test tones again here's a sine wave playing a G but approximately a hundred Hertz then I'll distort it with the heavy saturation style as I did in the beginners going to distortion video chopping off the tops and bottoms of the sine wave so it starts to resemble a square and creating a series of harmonics here's the fundamental adjust below 100 Hertz which we call the first harmonic the first of the extra added partials is just below 300 Hertz exactly three times the frequency of the first harmonic the next is at almost 500 Hertz exactly five times the frequency of the fundamental then seven times the frequency and nine and so on through all the odd numbers okay now let's try the old tape style I used earlier this is softer and warmer sounding than the heavy saturation startup and the behavior is more complex as we can see from the changing patterns of harmonics as I Drive it harder but notice that the harmonic series is the same the first added partial is actually the third harmonic the next is the fifth and so on for just the odd-numbered harmonics okay now let's try the warm tape style the higher harmonics drop in level so it does indeed sound warmer even at high drive settings but we still have only odd harmonics as before with lower drive settings however we can add just the third harmonic which can be delightfully subtle let's try this on a real mix one-way audible obvious distortion would definitely not be appropriate so I'm going to avoid the upper reaches of the drive knob but with this set well below the level where the distortion becomes obvious or even all the way down it still makes the sound subtly thicker and warmer as you can hopefully hear if I toggle by that [Music] you're okay now let's switch to the clean tube style this does indeed sound very clean and clear turning the drive up a bit makes it if annealing sound cleaner hey she's pretty good she was [Music] drinking all [Music] me [Music] the processed version seems brighter clearer more detail [Music] well if I crank for drive the illusion is shattered when we start to hear nasty sounding intermodulation again but we're not it's subtly the extra harmonics from very gentle distortion such as this can counter-intuitively make things sound more - not less so let's try the warm tube style and now we have a rounder fatter base instead of glossy trouble [Music] you're [Music] these differences are deliberately subtle but they can stack up if I run the wall tube style followed by the clean tube style hood series I can add both types of color [Music] [Music] she was [Music] okay let's break out the test tones again is a sine wave running through the warm tape setting we used earlier with just a single extra third harmonic being added now I'll switch to the warm Tube style notice the third harmonic drops in level but we now have the second harmonic as well had double the fundamental frequency if I toggle between the two settings they sound quite different even with just a simple sine wave input the tape style has a hint of the holo character of a square wave which becomes more pronounced if I turn up the drive while the tube style sounds sweeter and warmer and somehow less distorted even though that second harmonic is actually higher in level than the third harmonic added by the tape style the key difference between these is symmetry if the positive and negative halves of the wave are distorted in exactly the same way only odd harmonics will be added but if the top and bottom halves of the distortion are different we get both odd and even harmonics with the level of the even harmonics depending on how much asymmetry is introduced if I switched a clean tube the even harmonics are still there but lower in level in the odd harmonics indicating less asymmetry than the warm tube style which has very prominent even harmonics but he may have noticed an issue in the low frequencies the warm tube style seems to be adding a large amount of sub-base content by the look of it we'll need a fairly steep low-cut filter at around 20 Hertz to fix this but not all is as it seems which I can demonstrate by reducing the analyzer resolution now that sub-base content looks even more alarming extending right up to 50 Hertz in fact this is because asymmetric distortion produces asymmetric waveforms with the positive cycles louder or quieter than the negative and this looks like DC offset if the analyzer had infinite resolution and went a bit lower this would look like a narrow spike at zero Hertz this alarming looking lump at the bottom of the spectrum is just because this type of analyzer isn't good at showing zero Hertz content for proof I'm gonna add a low-cut filter set it to the gentlest possible 6 DB slope and tune it as low as it'll go at 10 Hertz on this totally and completely removes that low-frequency bump okay so let's look at what happens when you stack up nonlinearities in series I'll start with a warm tube setting then run that into a clean tube as I did with the little robots song earlier but actually the result doesn't look that different from just distorting it harder with a single stage but a single sine wave doesn't give us the whole picture real-world signals are invariably more complex than this so let's add just one more sine wave higher up and adds the warm tube stage and just like the harder distortion types we looked at last time the result is intermodulation with sum and difference partials appearing as well as the harmonics of each wave when I had another saturation stage those some indifference partials gained their own harmonics and Inter modulate one another again and the complexity grows exponentially [Laughter] there's a trombone part which I'm warming up with the warm tube style you can generally push the drive harder with individual parts than with full mixes but I'm still staying well below the level at which distortion becomes obvious this makes it look like I've got a sub bass problem but as we now know it isn't really a problem in any way it'll disappear with any high-pass filter in fact I've got an instance of saturn on every individual mic on the horn section plus another on the horns subgroup and yet another on the master buss in a traditional analog recording setup each signal will typically pass through multiple nonlinearities such as transformers tubes or tape and each will add their own subtle color to the sound but digital recording is made these artifacts optional which means if you want that analog style sound you need to add these nonlinearities deliberately listen to the difference when I bypass all 13 instances together [Music] the saturated version seems simultaneously brighter and warmer the saturation does a little of my EQ in work for me helping to add Spartan and reduce congestion in the low mid-range when the instances on the subgroup and the master helped to glue the horns and for mix respectively so this kind of a bell curve when it comes to saturation adding a little bit makes almost anything sound better a bit more might sound better still but they'll come a point where you're adding too much and that perceived quality starts to degrade again of course with digital recording you can just dial it back again in that case and it's much easier to end up with just the right amount in your mix that's all for now thanks for watching you you

Channel: FabFilter

Views: 128,012

Keywords: fabfilter, tutorial, audio, saturation, distortion, plug-in, vst, aax, pro tools, mixing, mastering, vintage, analog, tape, tube

Id: NO2OZ3UTy2k

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 12 2019