Recording - June 2016 - 20

Using harmonics and distortion for analog sound in digital mixes
There is a school of thought that says in this digital age of plug-ins, a recordist is
best off recording tracks as cleanly and as flat as possible, to maximize flexibility
during the mix. Another school of thought says that you should craft your tones
ahead of time on the way into a digital recording system, to maximize the sonic
potential and save yourself time during the mix. Both approaches are used successfully every day on recordings, but there is little question that the latter approach
generally requires a much higher budget for hardware: analog preamps, EQs, compressors, and other devices to achieve the desired tonality.
In a way, the gear choices that an engineer makes reflects their sonic personality.
Familiarity allows the engineer to quickly get the sounds they are looking for. For
busy professional engineers who need to work quickly, this approach makes perfect
sense, and is at the root of the analog gear explosion of the last decade. The amount
of great gear available these days, all made by passionate people, is astounding.
Ask the right question
The new generation of front-end hardware typically has more controls, often a gain
and a level knob or perhaps simple EQ or input impedance controls to manipulate
tone, rather than just a single gain knob on an interface preamp. Despite the additional expense of many of these units, they aren't necessarily better-they just sound different, and in many cases the differences are quite subtle. The four main parameters of
audio are frequency response, distortion, noise, and time-based effects, so whatever
differences in sound exist between audio products like mic preamps can be described
in terms of these parameters, and we can manipulate these parameters using plug-ins.
We can debate whether digital distortion can sound the same as analog, but I
believe this is the wrong question. Rather, I prefer to ask: can we make a given
recording sound better with the tools available to us?
With distortion plug-ins, we can add back in much of the tone we associate with
analog technology: tape, tubes, analog preamps, etc. We can then fine-tune the
added distortion with additional EQ or compression.

Figure 1: Harrison Mixbus 3.2, shown running on AVLinux 2016. Note the "drive"
control on all 8 buses, as well as on the Master bus, just below the VU meters.
20

RECORDING JUNE 2016

By James Lindenschmidt
It is quite edifying to mix with simple
stock plug-ins not known for a particular
tone they impart, but rather for simply and
cleanly doing their job. These simple plugins allow the engineer to experiment with
these ideas, learning how to sculpt tone
using the basic building blocks of audio.
Using these techniques, we can add harmonics and get our tones using software
rather than having to invest in hardware.
Distortion isn't always bad
While EQ and compression are widely
regarded as the most useful tone-sculpting
tools for the mix engineer, I think of distortion as a third method to change the tone
of a recording. Some mix engineers-
Tchad Blake is an obvious example-
have developed a unique and popular
style based in large part on their creative
use of distortion. In some ways, harmonic
manipulation encompasses both compression (since clipping can reduce dynamic
range) and also EQ (since it changes perception of certain frequency ranges).
For instance, if I find myself doing a lot
of broad EQ boosting to get better tone
out of a track, often using distortion to
add harmonics in those frequency ranges
sounds even better. By using distortion,
we are adding additional harmonic content not present in the original recording,
which is not the same as an EQ boost.
This technique is fantastic both on individual tracks and on the master bus.
In the early days of analog recording, it
would have been ludicrous to intentionally
add harmonics to a recording... the gear
being used added so much distortion of its
own that adding more did not improve the
tone of recordings! But today, with digital
audio recording so ubiquitous and so
clean, often some additional distortion-or
as I prefer to think of it, enhanced harmonic content-is just what the mix calls
for. Certainly by the end of the 1960s, it
was relatively commonplace to use distortion to add tone to a mix, the recordings
of Joe Meek and some of The Beatles'
later experiments being good examples.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Recording - June 2016