[HN Gopher] The cultural evolution of distortion in music
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The cultural evolution of distortion in music
Author : anigbrowl
Score : 71 points
Date : 2025-04-03 21:03 UTC (1 days ago)
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| Tade0 wrote:
| > for an electric guitar, a triangle wave
|
| That is only true when the string is plucked exactly at the
| middle - not a regular occurrence. Usually it's more of a
| sawtooth wave, just without the upper harmonics.
|
| My experience with distortion in guitars is that a huge component
| here is how different it can sound depending on articulation.
| Some pieces for example require the player to not alternate their
| picking, but pluck only in one direction, as the difference is
| audible.
|
| This is not always the case of course as some amplifiers like
| those made by Mesa Boogie get their signature tone by exploiting
| the limited gain-bandwidth product(GBP) of amplifiers, creating
| an even sound that at the high end of the gain setting is largely
| without dynamics.
|
| In some cases(like the BOSS DS-1) the manufacturer killed the
| sound by introducing a technically better amplifier chip - the
| original had somewhat poor GBP and poor settling time, which in
| combination produced a nice lowpass filter with a resonance peak
| at the cutoff frequency, which in turn emphasized articulation.
|
| It's all a surprisingly huge topic.
| ericwood wrote:
| Articulation is everything! Distortion is compression, and
| simple things like the I-V curves of a clipping diode or slew
| limiting from a crappier op amp make a huge difference in the
| "feel" of distortion, especially with guitar. I love how Boss
| pedals in the 80s started using a fairly simple discrete op amp
| design to have greater control over this, as well as stacking
| on more and more active filtering stages for pre and post
| emphasis on the distortion.
|
| Designing dirt pedals for guitar is a very humbling exercise in
| that many seemingly innocuous decisions can have large impacts
| on the end result. Often times you're bucking what would
| normally be EE best-practices and exploiting the edges of
| behavior in components to coax out pleasing nonlinearities.
| Equal parts engineering and what can feel like sorcery (but
| usually has a reasonable explanation).
| Tade0 wrote:
| My designs never left the breadboard, but indeed it was truly
| humbling to learn how these components actually behave in the
| wild. College level models don't do them justice.
|
| I'll never forget a friend showing me a Japanese made DS-1
| from 1983, which had all those pleasant artifacts stemming
| from the circuits non-ideal performance. Newer ones sound
| really harsh in comparison.
|
| The DS-1 is itself surprisingly complex. I'm particularly a
| fan of the little hidden RC circuit in the clipping
| stage(here spanning from R14 to C10):
|
| https://www.electrosmash.com/boss-ds1-analysis#layout
|
| As said in section 6.3, its effect is only significant below
| the diodes' forward voltage. I exchanged one diode in my unit
| with a yellow LED (a diode is a diode, all in all) and it was
| particularly audible. Initially I thought it's the LEDs
| junction capacitance, but that measures in tens of picofarads
| - not nearly enough to register.
| ericwood wrote:
| I love all of the little tricks they employ! The two pole
| filter on the Rat was really eye opening to me; it makes
| perfect sense once you sit down and think through it, and
| the implementation is very elegant in its simplicity.
|
| One of my favorites in this genre are using CMOS inverters
| as inverting op amps with a very pleasing and smooth
| distortion sound.
| kazinator wrote:
| When a string is plucked near the end where it is attached, the
| standing wave kind of makes jerking motions. It's just like
| when you jerk one end of a rope that is attached somewhere. You
| send a pulse up the rope which comes down again. If you look at
| one point on the rope, it might be making a quick movement one
| way, with a slower recovery in the other. This is where we get
| the sawtooth.
|
| For a sawtooth with all the harmonic, we have to use a bow. A
| bow directly stimulates a strong sawtooth movement simply
| because the string adheres to it and releases, many times a
| second. This will tune itself to a resonant frequency, along
| with the first bunch of its harmonics.
| mathieuh wrote:
| I don't know anything about the technical details but you can
| also hear the difference when plucking in different locations
| on the string very clearly on a classical guitar, to the point
| where it is an integral part of right-hand technique and is
| marked on music. Plucking closer to the neck has a very round,
| resonant sound, plucking closer to the bridge has a very sharp
| sound, and plucking exactly halfway along the string has a
| particularly round sound.
|
| As Segovia said, the guitar is like a miniature orchestra
| https://youtu.be/DJrEl4Nsmsg?si=voLmARBDxGe8iDRo
| itishappy wrote:
| Timbre:
|
| > In simple terms, timbre is what makes a particular musical
| instrument or human voice have a different sound from
| another, even when they play or sing the same note.
|
| > The physical characteristics of sound that determine the
| perception of timbre include frequency spectrum and envelope.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbre
| sesm wrote:
| IMO the main difference between downstroke and alternate
| picking is that at the same tempo downstroke will have 2 times
| shorter attack, because the player will have to move their hand
| 2 times faster.
| crmd wrote:
| > Some pieces for example require the player to not alternate
| their picking, but pluck only in one direction, as the
| difference is audible.
|
| I still remember the moment in my bedroom 30 years ago trying
| to play Master of Puppets when I accidentally discovered down-
| picking.
| SoleilAbsolu wrote:
| And were instantly promoted to Pastor of Muppets?
| crmd wrote:
| I actually have a Jim Henson Pastor of Muppets tee shirt
| that is an instant conversation starter with strangers
| anytime I wear it out!
| drops wrote:
| "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about
| a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the
| jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of
| these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be
| avoided. It's the sound of failure: so much modern art is the
| sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its
| limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the
| sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it.
| The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an
| emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The
| excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is
| the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium
| assigned to record them." - Brian Eno, 1996
| makz wrote:
| Or simply we just like things that have some noise.
| bee_rider wrote:
| There's a nostalgic aspect to lots of music. The errors we grew
| up with do become nostalgic. (And other sounds--what kind of a
| dead-hearted monster doesn't get a little happy to hear the
| first couple seconds of GSM interference noise? It's so jaunty,
| how has nobody worked that into some techno?). It reminds us of
| how things were when we were so cool that we could only afford
| junk.
|
| Nostalgia is cheap of course, but some times cheap things make
| us happy and that's fine.
| JeffeFawkes wrote:
| It has been worked into a tune! Love this artist (Venjent),
| he takes a lot of random samples like that and turns them
| into EDM tunes.
|
| https://youtu.be/gpQS41WQSPY?si=7zK7wbtulqbgx-AA
| defrost wrote:
| Almost forty five years ago, _Telephone and Rubber Band_ by
| PCO - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_h9AvSnYQA
| longwave wrote:
| Similarly, Mistabishi's _Printer Jam_ from 2009 sounds much
| like you might expect from the title.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALNV4ZW33fA
| soco wrote:
| Please someone mention The User with their Symphonies for
| dot matrix printers (1999 and later):
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Grb_EIDSVnY
| itishappy wrote:
| Venjent slaps, and this is his best track (imo).
|
| His door genre deserves recognition too.
| buildsjets wrote:
| Mario Piu, "Communication", 1999. Somebody pick up the phone!
|
| https://youtu.be/cBMWgiQujPw?si=WMrOoYMIamjRrWpf
| BoingBoomTschak wrote:
| > CD distortion
|
| lol.
| driggs wrote:
| Kudos to the author for writing an academic thesis on distortion
| in music, but it sure reads like an academic thesis rather than a
| statement about art.
|
| In contrast, I thoroughly enjoyed and resonated with this short
| conversation between Henry Rollins (Black Flag) and Don Was
| (President of _the_ Jazz label Blue Note) about distortion in
| music:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p6_WCqaucc
| trentlott wrote:
| Yeah, it's a bummer the clearly defined statement is so overly
| detailed and abstracted. It's way easier to listen to some dude
| talk about going to a lot of Stooges shows barefoot and vaguely
| talk about some random vinyl being 'angry'. Much easier and
| satisfyingly agreeable.
| myself248 wrote:
| Years ago, I hatched a theory, that one of the reasons my
| generation gravitated to rock and roll as teenagers, is that the
| sound of a distorted guitar closely resembles the sound of an
| engine, and is thus a symbol of freedom, just like getting one's
| driver's license.
|
| I shared this theory with my then-little-in-both-senses sister,
| who asked "what, exactly, is distortion, in a musical sense?"
|
| I trotted to my bedroom and retrieved Pink Floyd's _Pulse_. I
| popped disc 1 into the living-room CD player, cued up track 9
| (Sorrow), and turned it up. We potched out onto the floor.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO9Kp_Wn_2A
|
| "Oh. Okay. Yeah, alright. I think I get it."
| marc_abonce wrote:
| That's pretty much what futurist Luigi Russolo predicted back
| in the 1910's:
|
| > This musical evolution is paralleled by the multipication of
| machines, which collaborate with man on every front. Not only
| in the roaring atmosphere of major cities, but in the country
| too, which until yesterday was totally silent, the machine
| today has created such a variety and rivalry of noises that
| pure sound, in its exiguity and monotony, no longer arouses any
| feeling.
|
| > For many years Beethoven and Wagner shook our nerves and
| hearts. Now we are satiated and we find far more enjoyment in
| the combination of the noises of trams, backfiring motors,
| carriages and bawling crowds than in rehearsing, for example,
| the "Eroica" or the "Pastoral".
|
| Based on this idea it should be no surprise that, for example,
| heavy metal riffs were invented by a factory worker[2] or that
| the first techno music scene started in Detroit[3].
|
| [1] Luigi Russolo. The Art of Noises:
| https://www.ubu.com/papers/russolo.html
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Iommi#Factory_accident
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_techno
| arp242 wrote:
| Both the electric guitar and distortion effects were invented
| in the 30s. People weren't really able to do distortion effects
| before that. You can always try to post-hoc explain everything
| and try to find "reasons" for things, but it seems to me just a
| simple matter of the technology not being there and that's all
| there is to it.
| itishappy wrote:
| Fascinating! I wonder what the modern day equivilent would
| be...
|
| I'm betting a computer in this digital age, hence the rise of
| electronic music.
| kazinator wrote:
| Distortion of monophonic tones (single notes/voices) became
| accepted in the mainstream quite rapidly because the circuits
| used to produce it quickly improved, informed by feedback (no pun
| intended) from musicians.
|
| Nobody hates ugly sounding distortion more than he or she who
| practices 5 hours a day with it.
|
| Single note distortion, at its best, is a harmonically rich sound
| which shares something with bowed instruments and reed woodwinds.
|
| Nasty sounding single distortion has not gained complete
| mainstream acceptance. Musicians who do that on purpose will
| remain niche, even today. From time to time, such nasty sounds
| make appearances in mainstream pop, but only as a kind of
| "cameo". The statement is, "we are inserting this ugly thing here
| specifically for its idiosyncratic effect, haha! But only a few
| seconds, we promise".
|
| Distortion (other than perhaps mild distortion) has never been
| fully accepted in roles where the multiple voices of a complex
| harmony part would be distorted together.
|
| Nowhere was that better seen than in jazz/rock fusion, which
| accepted ragingly distorted guitars for solo work, but not so
| much for the rest of the music: except, of course, in passages
| where the guitars provide the "sound of rock": distorted fourths
| and fifths and whatnot, or double stop bluesy cliches and
| whatnot.
|
| The music best known for distortion and that couldn't exist
| without distortion (and a lot of it) is of course heavy metal,
| which is a big landscape of styles and sounds.
|
| In metal, the harmonies from an individual guitar part tend to
| consist of only a few notes. The clean chord is transformed into
| something else, which perhaps cannot be described in music
| notation. Complexity comes from the distortion. Distortion
| includes the sum and difference products, which relate to the
| tonality and scale of the music in unsual ways. Those notes are
| not identified. If notation is used at all, the underlying clean
| notes are notated: e.g. C-F# tritone on the A and D strings, over
| open E bass. Heavy metal uses syncopated and alternating rhythms
| to separate bass notes from upper notes in three and four note
| chords. This is not only to create rhythmical excitement, but to
| better separate the notes.
|
| The notes of a distorted chord are also easier to for the ear to
| identify if they are introduced separately as a _lasciare
| suonare_ arpeggio; that 's a thing in metal.
|
| Harmonic textures are also created by combining distorted guitar
| parts. Using two lead guitars originated in rock, with groups
| like Wishbone Ash. Multitrack recording allows an unlimited
| number of parts to be layered.
| progmetaldev wrote:
| As someone who is very much into heavily distorted guitar with
| long feedback loops, I appreciate your comment (especially for
| the insight). I'm a huge fan of doom/stoner/sludge/psychedelic
| metal (and all variations of those), where distortion and
| feedback are often used to create sounds that are difficult to
| notate. Combined with progressive metal/rock, which is heavily
| reliant on that jazz/rock fusion, and you get entire genres
| built around the harmonics and odd sounds that show up from
| lots of distortion.
|
| I feel that Sunn O))) - named after the amplifiers, are a great
| example of slow rhythm music that relies upon heavy distortion
| and feedback to create the atmosphere and primary sound of
| their music. This is just a modern band, but the
| experimentation and techniques go back to psychedelic and acid
| rock from the 1960's, and mostly center around Black Sabbath as
| "the" band that really created the prototype for the sound.
|
| Monolord, Bongzilla, Acid King, Bongripper, REZN, and SLEEP are
| some great modern examples that fit what you've described.
| itishappy wrote:
| > Distortion (other than perhaps mild distortion) has never
| been fully accepted in roles where the multiple voices of a
| complex harmony part would be distorted together.
|
| I'll fight this by agreeing with you. Saturation (a form of
| mild distortion) on the master is what I like to refer to as
| "the shit" because a nearly imperceptible amount really makes a
| track cohere. It takes a super light touch though, but I'd bet
| (without evidence) it's used on most tracks today.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| It is kind of interesting how long it took for people to start
| applying distortion to other parts of the track outside the
| guitar. Seemed like that started when people were doing 4 track
| mixing on little cassette tascoms that would clip unlike
| expensive studio multitrack setups. Neutral Milk Hotel and
| such.
| tarnith wrote:
| To sum this up a bit: Harmonic distortion is well accepted,
| unless done to an extreme amount. What people seem to struggle
| with most is intermodulation distortion, cross modulation, etc.
|
| If you ever want to hear a guitar sound as rich as a synth,
| listen to someone running full polyphonic outputs for each
| string into a distortion per string. You get the rich harmonic
| violin/synth like tones of every string but can play full
| chords without any of the intermodulation products!
|
| I'm kind of surprised guitars have stayed monophonic for as
| long as they have, and I feel like the next advance might be a
| cultural shift of guitars to a true polyphonic output path.
| Would definitely open up some interesting DSP pedal
| opportunities as a bonus.
|
| The future is distorted guitars that can play complex chords
| imo
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