Saturday, August 27, 2022

Difference between old school and modern guitar distortion

 



Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to clarify a bit what are the characteristics of the old school guitar distortion and the modern day hi-gain tone.

Let's start from the base: a distortion is an effect achieved by taking a signal and boosting it on purpose in order to make it become degraded, but in a controlled, euphonic way, with the aim of making it sound more aggressive and compressed, and this is exactly how it went initially; guitarists were plugging their guitars into tube amps and cranking them to the maximum (also because at the early stages there wasn't even what we might call today a p.a.), and the amps just couldn't handle it, so distortion was an unexpected (but usually welcomed) side effect.

Then Hendrix and rock n'roll in general exploded, guitarists were experimenting with their tone like crazy and pushing the boundaries with every record, and the amp producers simply adapted to the needs, creating amps (and pedals) capable of distorting on purpose without the need of putting everyting on 10.

Back in the day of the first hi-gain amps, distortion was permeating the whole frequency range, because it was generated both by the gain stages of the preamplifier and from the power amp, stressing its power tubes, and a good example of the early amps which featured a high-gain tone were the Marshall and the Orange amps of the '70s among the others.
An Orange amp is a good example of old school distortion: it's prominent in the low-mids, which makes it a bit dark sounding, and it's very distorted in that same area, making the tone not very defined and not easy to control, but very punchy for example with groovy single string riffs, like many Led Zeppelin ones, in which every note hits you like a truck.

Modern guitar distortion instead is all about control. This is obtained from amps which through the years had more and more gain stages and which relied less and less on the power amp to distort, until we arrived to amps with large tube power amps (e.g. 120w), with 6L6 power tubes which have a lot of headroom, and all this is to make the power amp sound clean and the amp to rely mostly on the preamplifier for its gain.
This different setup has 2 objectives: 1) to stress less the power amp, thus prolonging the life of the tubes 2) to have a cleaner, tighter low end.

To make the distorted sound even tighter, guitarists like to take a hi-gain head (for example a Mesa Boogie or a Peavey 5150), use the distorted channel and boost it with an overdrive, because it makes the input signal even hotter and the result is a tone with a fast attack, reduced low-mids and a tighter low-end (meaning that when playing a fast, palm muted riff the recoil of the lows is faster and less prominent, so you can hear the riff more clearly).

This solution is particularly good with low tunings (to be honest today it's very hard to even find a band that plays contemporary hard rock-heavy metal in E), because it adds clarity, so in conclusion the modern distortion is about a tight, controlled low-end (which needs to sound clean, because if it's too distorted the riff will sound like a mess, to the point that some metal amp has a separate gain knob for the lows and one for the highs) and a screaming, very defined upper mid range, with a clear attack and good string separation, if you want to play some articulate djenty riff like those of Periphery.

Clearly I have provided the example of 2 very different type of tones and there are surely a million tones in between the old school and the modern one, but I felt like explaining this difference, because it can help defining more the type of sound we have in mind.

Which one among the 2 do you prefer?


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Saturday, August 20, 2022

Review: Audio Assault Klank (with video sample)

 


Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're reviewing a new bass amp simulator from Audio Assault: Klank!

Klunk is the simulation of a preamp pedal that looks very simlar to some of the Darkglass ones: it features 3 levels of eq (one with knobs and two graphic ones, one of which in the rack after the preamp), 2 types of distortion, 2 shaping flavors (vintage and modern), compressor, noise gate, tuner and a dual IR loader with many bass IRs by Seacow Cabs.
One thing to notice about the ir loader is also the fact that you can move freely the virtual microphone on the speaker not only with the bundled irs but with any ir! 

This simulator is the third one for bass, after Bassgrinder and Duality Bass Studio, and it's the first one to emulate a pedal preamp, and it's the most advanced of the 3, it has also a very nice resizable UI.

How does it sound? It's sounds quite good, as you can hear from the sample, but it sounds also very versatile, thanks to all the IRs and the eq capabilities, which makes this plugin very versatile in terms of tone shaping.

What would I improve in the future? Here's my suggestions to Audio Assault: I would ship the plugin (not only this but all of them, since it's a problem that I'm encountering often) with a leaflet in pdf that explains exactly what each knob and switch do, because without it we might be lacking or misunderstanding some function; I would also add some graphic representation of the compression (be it a vu meter with the needle, or with the '80s leds, or in any other form), because it would help when doing some fine tuning and would spare us the need of an external compressor.

All in all, when looking for a very quick metal tone I still prefer Bassgrinder, for its capability of separating the distorted part and the clean part and because it features a limiter, but if you're looking for versatility and tone shaping capabilities you can't go wrong with Klank!

Thumbs up!

 

Specs taken from the website:


- 2 distortion modes

- 2 shaping flavors

- Graphic EQ

- Double IR loader with custom bass amp IRs from Seacow Cabs

- Rack with 9 bands graphic equalizer and compressor

- tuner, noise gate


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Saturday, August 13, 2022

How to keep the bass stable with a limiter

 


Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!

Today we are going a little more in depth in the topic of mixing with a limiter, and this article should be taken as an expansion of our "Should I put a limiter on each single track when I mix?" discussion.

My conclusion today of this whole discussion is that depends on the genre. 
There are genres in which the instruments with the biggest dynamic excursion (which are usually bass, vocals, maybe cymbals, clean or acoustic guitars and acoustic instruments in general), those in which the performer can really choose to play some part extremely quiet and extremely hard can use some track limiting, while in other genres like extreme metal, in which there is already a lot of distortion (which acts as natural compressor), drum samples etc, this is less useful and you can stick also just with the compression.

Let me elaborate more: 

If you have a song in which in the first half the singer sings with just a whisper and in the second half sings one octave higher, with very loud peaks, the first thing to do is to do some clip gain, then when the volumes are more or less consistent you can put some compression to make the track more coherent, and finally, since maybe in the highest and loudest parts there might remain some loud peak, instead of manually lowering every peak you can put a limiter with a threshold set only to check those, and bring them down.
In this case the limiter acts as final wall for the peaks that are so loud that still can't be properly tamed by a compressor, because if you would set the compressor hard enough to stop them, it would harm the rest of the vocal track, and the same concept applies to any other instrument.

The trick therefore, if you still hear some part in some track that is popping out too much, is first to try to see if you can solve in some other way, for example sometimes in palm mutings the low-end recoil can be solved simply lowering the bass on the amp or moving the microphone a couple of cm back from the speaker, but if you can't solve, the limiter with a high threshold, set just to stop those occasional peaks, can be a solution, just don't overdo it, like leaving it with a threshold that keeps it active all the time, or you will damage the sound of your instrument.

I hope this was helpful! 


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Saturday, August 6, 2022

Review: Nembrini Audio Crunck v2 (free Vst plugin with video sample)

 


Hello everyone and welcome to this week's article!

Today we're going to talk about another interesting plugin, this time free, the almighty Nembrini Audio Crunck v2

Crunck v2 is the second version of Crunck, the first plugin designed by Igor Nembrini in the beginning of his career in DSP development more than ten years ago.
It's a virtual amplifier with a very clean and simple layout, which features all the classic controls of a real amp (gain, master, presence and eq section), and which has a bypassable cabinet section with a V30 speaker impulse response.

This virtual amplifier, which is one of the few ones available also for Iphone and Ipad through the App Store (free as well), is quite versatile and provides a very warm tone, with a gain knob that allows to dial a huge amount of gain, and lets you achieve quite a wide range of tones.

How does it sound? I'd say it sounds quite well, but it's more geared towards the rock and hard rock tones than the metal ones, since it has a lot of energy in the low mids that is not easy to get rid of (in the sample I have used an overdrive in front), so if you are looking for a creamy bluesy tone, or a fusion lead tone, this it's probably the plugin for you.

Anyway since it's free I suggest everyone to go check it out in the Nembrini website, a website that offers also other free plugins, along with paid ones.

Thumbs up!


Specs:


- 3 bands EQ

- bypassable cabinet simulator with built-in IR

- Gain, Master and presence knob

- available in all plugin formats and as Apple store app


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