The cultural evolution of distortion in music
royalsocietypublishing.org68 points by anigbrowl a day ago
68 points by anigbrowl a day ago
> 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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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."
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
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.
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.
“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
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.
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.
Similarly, Mistabishi's Printer Jam from 2009 sounds much like you might expect from the title.
Please someone mention The User with their Symphonies for dot matrix printers (1999 and later): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Grb_EIDSVnY
Venjent slaps, and this is his best track (imo).
His door genre deserves recognition too.
Almost forty five years ago, Telephone and Rubber Band by PCO - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_h9AvSnYQA
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:
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.