Culture Vulture – Distorting Your Audio With Intent

One thing I am passionate about, and tell all my students, is if something is happening in your audio, hopefully it is because you used your knowledge to choose to make it happen and did not haphazardly get there. Distortion will fall into that category. Normally we teach all day long how not to distort and get the perfect gain structure for excellent signal to noise structure. But when you’re out of ideas and looking for something new to try in or on your mix, think distortion. Distortion can be a subtle or drastic effect applied to instruments or your entire mix that will add some flavor when there is something missing. It can be smooth like tape distortion, or nasty like a circuit failing. I prefer smooth for compression type sounds which can be a thickening agent and I leave the nasty to specific instruments. But at the end of the day, I always keep my options open to the song in front of me and let it show me the way. Try it, You might like it even if your name is not Mikey. If you want to hear some of these options, check out this video where I run all the different settings of the Culture Vulture on a stereo mix.  Checkout Thermionic Cultures products.