Is it just me, but do most "wow complex" distortions just sound garbage?

[donkey tugger]

eleven.gif

[_leras]

NI Driver is also in the ballpark and it too sounds noticeably less harsh than Trash. Still not good, but at least it's not piercingly harsh.

A lot of these plug-ins seem to have the same basic tonalities, but they do something differently on it.

I think driver is very different, it sounds great, but easily swerves into wild high resonance, so finding the spot can be tricky.

Trash has a lot more types of distortion and the filter part is not so good imo. For me Trash 2 doesn't always work very well, but when it does it can actually be great and really beef up a sound in a pretty unique way.

[_leras]

Try Trash Lite. It's quite capable. No reason to being going off of the online demos. Plus, sometimes you need something rough and harsh, and this is great for that. I'm nailing Ed Rush & Optical sounds with it.

Not the same as nailing a culture culture...?

Can't speak for the Arturia, but the UAD culture vulture is one of, if not the best ITB saturation. Very natural and analogue distortion/saturation. A one trick pony, but its very good trick.

I don't think Trash really gets that close.

[eLawnMust]

First eliminate the possibility of the tune itself being terrible... Disable all FX including distortions, delays, reverbs... All of it. Now if it sounds real playskool basic & does not test out standalone then no amount of distortion expertise is going to help so no sense covering it up with icing if the cake is bad...

Other than that there are very much horrible distortions & a few good ones...

[vitocorleone123]

eleven.gif

The Drive and Gain knobs on the Elysia Karacter hardware go to 11

[donkey tugger]

eleven.gif

The Drive and Gain knobs on the Elysia Karacter hardware go to 11

Now you mention it, remembered that XLN RC20 also has this on the distortion;

[Uncle E]

I don't think Trash really gets that close.

Did you try the settings I posted?

[mystran]

I think "complex" transfer curves can be useful to control dynamics.

Think about it this way: a simple saturation will always compress so that once you push it hard enough, that's it.. the most you'll get is a bit more perfect 6db/oct decay of harmonics, but things won't really get any louder or anything. At the opposite end we have cross-over distortion that makes a mess of low-level signals, but hardly matters once the signal is loud enough.. so one of these distorts at high levels and one of them distorts at low levels.

So.. you can have a more complex curve too where the distortion is somewhere in the middle... like it could cause distortion when you exceed a certain level, but need to compress the dynamics when the signal gets louder still. This can be useful when you're not driving the distortion "as hard as possible" but rather letting different parts of a signal with actual dynamics excite different parts of the curve.

If you just want to drive things "as hard as possible" then yeah.. some sort of simple saturation curve is probably what you want and at that point what matters more than the curve is the pre-/post-EQ applied.. which can quite drastically shape the character of the distortion even if you're stuck with nothing more than a tanh.

[_leras]

I don't think Trash really gets that close.

Did you try the settings I posted?

I will, but my comparison is the UAD not the Arturia.

I think I'm quite discerning with regards to saturation/distortion. But then I have closed a project thinking I didn't really like a Coldfire distortion I'd used only to think wow that sounds great, what is it, next time I opened the project.

A lot of this is pretty subjective and even mood dependent at times.

[Uncle E]

The tape distortion is nice, too. Smoother than the ones I chose before. I’m still learning it, it’s not like I know all that it’s capable of, but I find it pretty easy to dial in and I like the deep level of control it offers. Certainly one of the better free plugins I’ve used.

[Blue Cat Audio]

* Destructor

Blue Cat's?

Since it exposes the transfer function, then why isn't it similar to Trash?

It is actually quite different, as the transfer function is dynamic (it reacts to the signal) and its response to gain can be tweaked in details. It also has tone maps and lots of other things that make it a complete different beast, capable of modeling not only distortion but also many other kinds of non-linear processors (gates, compressors...).



Oh and drive actually goes to 11 .

[Uncle E]

Wow! How does the dynamic aspect relate to hardware? Does tape change shape based on how hard it’s hit?

[soundmodel]

* Destructor

Blue Cat's?

Since it exposes the transfer function, then why isn't it similar to Trash?

It is actually quite different, as the transfer function is dynamic (it reacts to the signal) and its response to gain can be tweaked in details. It also has tone maps and lots of other things that make it a complete different beast, capable of modeling not only distortion but also many other kinds of non-linear processors (gates, compressors...).



Oh and drive actually goes to 11 .

It's quite surprising if/that Trash hasn't figured that out.

It sounds very natural that the transfer function should be a function of input amplitude ...

[rj0]

A lot of my wow distortions sound like Trash. Hmm.

[Ah_Dziz]

I use drawable waveshapers as much as any other distortion I have access to. Decent pre and post filtering is major as with any distortion. It's also extremely important to have a good idea of gain into a waveshapers and afterwards.

I'm not a fan of isotope in recent year so I didn't check out their reboot of trash. Provided there's some oversampling and maybe some modulation on offer, it should work as well as any other waveshaper and therefore most distortions. Thinking that an all purpose transfer function will "work" with whatever you may decide to throw into it is a bit silly whatever your distortion preferences are.