A beginner's guide to distortion mastery (Lab Notes #2)

I need to tell you about a recent obsession.

Over the course of 2024 and 2025 I wanted to understand "distortion" inside and out. Why does it sound awesome sometimes, but really awful other times? What is actually happening under the hood? What gear or plugins are the "best" at it?

I even went as far as getting a layman's understanding of circuit diagrams and electrical engineering to pull apart exactly what a guitar overdrive pedal or fuzz pedal is doing under the hood. 

I tried so many plugins, so many guitar pedals, and a rack's worth of modular distortion devices that it put me way over budget... but I came away with a first principals understanding of what it means to not only distort heavily but to distort tastefully.

The following is a fairly non-technical, non-hand-wavy, practical guide to distortion that you can use in your own projects. This will gloss over a lot of the boring technical stuff and skip right to the things I think about every time I work on my own songs.

Ready to be a master of distortion? Let's dive in:

 

 

1. It's mostly just a bunch of squares

Let's start with a quick primer on popular types of distortion. 

Without getting into the technical details of why they behave this way, the easiest way to think about the vast majority of saturators, distortions, preamps, and overdrives is that they force waveforms into a square-like shape as you turn up the drive. This includes your common flavors like tube, tape, diode, and more.

The quiet parts of the signal become more vertical, and the loudest parts begin to flatten out. Every device creates a slightly different shape due to a million factors and some get to that shape slower or faster than others but I'm not kidding when I say that in practice the resulting waveform is almost always moving towards something that looks like a square wave.

And yeah, I know this last one doesn't look really like a square but I still think it counts. You'll see why later in this article.

Digital hard clippers create a square shape too, but they do it mathematically which is why they can make perfectly hard corners. Unlike saturators, they don't really bend the quiet parts of the waveform into a more vertical shape, they just focus on chopping the tops off, which is why clipping can sound "sudden" or "out of place" in some contexts (like on an orchestra recording), but almost invisible in others (like mixing drums).

Speaking of digital, bitcrushing distortion also makes square shapes but the squares look like steps, as you can see below. It's a weird one because if the squares are very small then you get that high-pitched sound of sampler aliasing but if the squares are very big it starts to sound like a unique distortion pedal.

In the case that you have an allergy to square waves though, digital wave folders and customizable wave shapers totally buck this trend which makes them very different beasts to work with.

It's a big topic on its own but all you need to know is that these devices don't make squares. They start flipping, mangling or mirroring the waveform instead. The amount of folding or twisting or shaping they do completely depends on the loudness of the incoming audio. For wave shapers specifically, things get ugly fast if you draw jagged or uneven lines. It can sound very cool too, though.

So before we go further, I should ask the big important question...

Which distortion device is the best for making disgusting distorted sounds? 

It turns out, none of them. Or perhaps all of them.

It's true that they all have their own flavor but, as you'll see in a moment, you can easily manipulate so many things about how they sound.

The biggest differences between them come down to which waveform shape they like to make, how fast they can change audio into that shape, and how hard the corners can get. It's definitely true that some distortion devices are a bit better at playing nice with drums or vocals or synths than others.

But even so, after thousands of hours of this stuff, I can confidently say it really just comes down to:

• what you think sounds cool and/or
• what you think is important for your sound and/or 
• what you consider to be the most convenient in your workflow.

It’s unsatisfying to some, but I think the best thing anyone can do is to get a feel for stuff in the same way you might go to a guitar store and try out the guitars. 

Take some extra time to try out a bunch of types of software distortion (tube, tape, transistor, digital, etc) made by different companies, do all the free trials, close your eyes and listen to what they do, and don't let anyone else tell you what you think is dope. If you’re lucky enough to have access to hardware, try out those things too. But you don't have to spend a lot of money at the beginning while your learn what's out there.

Anyway... let’s move on.

 

2. EQ like your life depends on it

There's a reason most guitar distortion pedals have a tone knob. It's because changing the frequency balance of the incoming audio can create some wildly different results without changing anything about the distortion parts at all.

So if you use a DAW, then you probably have a parametric eq like this one built right in.

Using EQs before the distortion is the key to making the best damn distorted sounds you've ever made. In fact, its probably the most fun part, and it's very easy too.

As you start pouring on that heavy distortion, keep these rules in mind:

• The lowest frequencies of your sound take priority and define the overall texture of the result,
• the middle frequencies add body and harshness, and
• the high frequencies will either end up sounding sharp or more like white noise as you distort further

To change the amount of influence that each of these frequency ranges have, you can adjust them with an EQ before the distortion. Let me show you what happens.

If we do a boost so the low frequencies are now very loud, the sound "blows out". This can also happen if there are just too many things happening which all have low frequencies or sub.

But if we cut out some of the lows, the rest of the sound gets some room to breathe and it brings detail back into the end result. This is probably the most common EQ move I make every single day.

Now if the mids are louder than everything else, then the sound is going to become radio-like. That can be desirable but it might also pick up some unwanted moments of blowout or harshness.

If the mids are quiet, then you can end up with a textural effect as the low frequencies rumble into the highest frequencies. This is a pretty common trick and it's great for making heavy bass sounds.

If the highest frequencies are too loud compared to the rest, things can start to sound pretty harsh. Loudness warning!

If the highest frequencies are turned down, the result is... well, it still sounds pretty good actually. This is because the act of distorting the rest of the frequencies ends up adding a lot of those high harmonics back.

I'm sure you've already had this thought - why not move the EQ around with some automation? Hell yes, that's a great idea.

 

So as you saw above, you can follow a simple rule of thumb which is to turn down the low end if you want to distort a lot without losing detail. You really can't go wrong with that one.

 

3. Dynamics, but like blowing out candles on a cake

Think about a birthday cake with lots of lit candles. You just made a birthday wish and now you have to blow out the candles, so where do you direct the air?

Obviously if you were to blow air only on one side of the cake, it would snuff out the candles on that side while nearby candles would moving in the wind, and candles on the far end wouldn't move at all.

But wait, why would you do that? Well in an unfortunate twist of fate, you are wearing a neck brace and you cant actually move your head to blow out all the candles. So what do you do? You move the whole cake!

Getting back to audio now, think about the volume of your starting sound like a bunch of candles and think about the distortion as the air being blown. Your job as the producer is to influence what parts of the audio are loud enough to get distorted (aka moving the candles in front of the air stream).

If you simply crank the drive knob on your distortion device, it's like replacing your lungs with a leaf blower - yes, you blew all the candles out but you blew chunks of cake onto the floor too. We call that an unwanted side effect. Parts of your sound may start to distort in ways you might not actually like. It turns out that manipulating the incoming audio first is going to give you a lot more control over the outcome of the distortion.

Let's do some concrete examples.

Try using a compressor, or even that OTT thing, to boost quiet parts of the source audio so they are eventually distorted in a similar way to the loudest parts.

Calling back to the previous section, using an EQ is another valid method of doing this, because boosting or cutting a frequency will effectively raise or lower the volume of that frequency. 

Here's another example, this time of boosting the tail of a kick drum without boosting the transient:

Here's an example of the opposite, where the transient is now super loud and the tail is quiet:

It's very different, so I can confidently say you'll want to keep one hand on a volume knob at all times when working with distortion.

This is a key concept of synth modulation with the envelopes and LFOS as well. When it comes to making synth patches, you'll be doing a lot more with creating dynamics rather than taming them, so making the level/volume/gain knobs change over time is one of the most common ways to give your synths some variety.

That's enough about that. Let's move to the next one.

 

 

4. A guitar cab is a filter, and you can too

Have you ever heard what a guitar amp sounds like before it goes into the speaker cabinet? It's kind of awful (loudness warning):

When you listen with the cab though, all that high end hissing is gone:

This is because the speaker cone cannot vibrate fast enough to accurately reproduce all of those high frequencies. Additionally, the microphone recording the speaker will pick up only so much of the sound depending on where and how it is positioned.

In practice, you lose high end information because of the cab and as a result the guitar sounds more pleasing. It turns out we can use this same principle to make all heavily-distorted things sound controlled and pleasant in the mix.

When you do distortion, it almost always makes things a lot bolder and brighter, so as a rule, every time you use a distortion device, make sure you put an EQ right after and think about whether you want to dampen those new frequencies which were just created. 

Most of the time I find myself cutting out some high end and also cutting some of the mids where it makes my ears tired. I do this every single time I distort something. At this point I bet I've done this hundreds of thousands of times.

 

 

5. A guitar pedal is an FX chain in a box

Remember how at the beginning of this article I claimed that one of the GIFs was a square shape but it clearly looked not-square? Let me show you how I made that.

Here's a sine wave:

Now I'm going to add two instances of Serum's diode distortion. It looks extremely square.

But here's the twist: I'm going to add an EQ and roll off the low end.

It's not square anymore... but it is a square in spirit, though. Because the sine wave was first turned into a square with (digital) diodes and then filtered after in order to control its output.

Very often there are other things happening in physical circuitry which cause the waveform to look less square. A good example of one is op-amp slew rate.

Now take a look at the output from the ProCo RAT pedal. The waveform is not exactly square but I'm sure you can imagine how it was square at one point and then it was effected by something else later on. It also has an op-amp inside, by the way.

I didn't even touch on the possibility of biasing, where one side of the waveform looks more square than the other, but that's for another time 

There are tons of examples of this kind of thing happening in the real world. What I'm trying to say is...

...most distortion boxes aren't just made up of the distortion part, they're more like a full length effects chains with multiple distortion sections and multiple filters and multiple side-effects crammed into a case, and that's before you even start adding the tone knobs and whatnot.

The next time you reach for your favorite distortion plugin, try stacking that thing a couple of times, with filters and EQ and gain staging between each one. That's how the hardware does it, so why are you selling yourself short in the DAW? Stack it up!

 

Lastly, a note for the for the technical folks:

There's plenty to be said about things like non-linearities and transient response. Many people say that hardware saturation sounds "more alive" and "more musical" than software and there are reasons why that can often be true. You might find yourself reading about optical compressor program-dependence or perhaps how different components each handle the big spikes in voltage coming from a drum microphone. It's true that hardware can create a bit of a different result than what software might do with the same audio, but I believe that it's completely up to you whether you think that difference is noticeable and important to your sound. 

Because the reality is that most people listen to music using earbuds, laptop speakers, consumer-grade over-ear cans, and car stereo systems with the bass cranked up.

 

---

 

Alright that's all for now. I hope you came away with some things to try in your next production session. And if you want to deconstruct a bunch of distorted sounds, check out the patches myself and others have built for Noise Dept. You can hear them all by watching the videos embedded into each product page.

Thanks, and take care of yourselves.

- Geoff