Wanna Make It Shine? Distort It

There are some deeply paradoxical things about recording and producing audio. For example, if you want to have a huge drum sound on record, you often need a drummer who’s able to lay back and play quite softly, in order to hit consistently. Similarly, when you’re mixing and you’re trying to make your record sound energetic and powerful, it helps to mix it at very, very quiet volumes.

These are all products of the basic properties of sound and psychoacoustics, the study of how we perceive sound subjectively.

Here’s another weird little trick that sounds totally counterintuitive: in order to make something sound cleaner, you can add distortion.

This is not so much an auditory illusion or a feature of psychoacoustic laws. It’s rather a failure of language. The ideas of “clean” and “distorted” are not just subjective terms and dependent on the ears of the beholder—they’re actually misleading in profound ways.

Take the idea of “distortion”. What comes to mind when you think of distortion? It might be a muffled, scratchy, fuzzy sound. A loud, buzzing guitar coming through a cranked Marshall full stack. And that would be true. That guitar sound is definitely experiencing distortion. But what exactly is happening to that sound?

Essentially, what you’re doing as you put the signal through the amplifier’s circuit is to add high frequencies. Not any old high frequencies, but high frequencies related to the notes being played on the guitar (i.e. its harmonics). Those harmonics might have already been present in the dry sound, but by overdriving the signal, you can accentuate them and bring their relative levels up.

Now imagine a “clean” sound. What does that sound like? If you’re a guitarist, maybe it’s a Fender amp, with bright, sparkly treble frequencies. And again, you’d be right. And those high frequencies are also related to the notes being played on the guitar (i.e. its harmonics). So, in a sense, a “distorted” sound has the same basic feature—extra high frequency content—as a “clean” sound.

That’s obviously an oversimplification, but it illustrates the problem—when we talk about “distortion” in an everyday sense (like when we step on a distortion pedal), we are talking about a very particular form of extreme distortion. We’re not just adding a few higher-order harmonics. We’re going to town and leaving no prisoners.

But if we stopped thinking about distortion as a head-melting tool that comes in black pedals with skulls and bleeding typefaces; if we instead called it, say, “harmonic enhancement” and used it more judiciously, it would be treated completely differently.

There’s probably a larger message to be extracted there. About how “imperfection” can actually bring out the beauty hidden beneath. But that’s another topic for another day.