What is distortion?

[Lopyt]

Distortion is basically adding harmonics to an input based on a function. Since distortion often clips the sound in some way it can reduce the dynamic range of your sound. That can be useful for making thick drum sounds, but it also may kill the drum transients, resulting in dull sounding drums. It is very easy to overdo distortion, and it is best used as a subtle effect rather than cranking it to the max on all the instruments. That being said, the specific types of distortion OnlineSequencer offers can be used very creatively for new sounds. You can create good bass sounds with distortion in OS, and use intermodulation (dissonance) in those bass sounds for cool wobbles. OnlineSequencer comes with various types of distortion, some work better on one thing than another. Limit is probably the safest distortion to use, on most instruments though, for that subtle effect. Another thing to note is that, due to the way these distortion functions work, adding distortion also often increases the volume of the instrument, which you should compensate for.

Here is a photo of one of these functions. Not specificallyan OnlineSequencer one, but basically how they work. The waveshaper works kind of similarly to a compressor or expander, where there is a line that determines the dynamic response of audio. A line y=x would be the original audio. The difference is, the waveshaper does not have an RMS delay and works instantly on every peak of a waveform. By editing the function, to say y=ln(x) instead of y=x, that would mean the dymanic range of the wave get decreased as the volume increases, and at lower slopes the more harmonics are added. OnlineSequencer includes a variety of fixed waveshaper functions to use. Also, the reason the volume may increase when adding distortion is because thats literally what you are doing, increasing the input volume to the waveshaper.




By having a lower slope near the maximum volume, the peaks of a wave are more aggressively smushed


Try it out and discover some cool new sounds or subtle ways to make your music better

[Liam]

One thing that might be a bit different about OS's distortion compared to other tools is the way the distortion volume works (the slider next to the distortion drop-down menu). This doesn't affect the amplitude of the signal going into the wave shaper. Instead it cross fades between the original undistorted signal, and a 100% distorted signal (this is also how the reverb volume works).

Changing the amplitude of the signal going into the shaper can be handy to produce different sounds, but I couldn't implement it that way due to technical limitations. If you want something like that, you can change the volume of the notes, because that volume is applied before the distortion. For example, check out the sawtooth bass in this sequence. You can hear the tone change as the note volume increases, because it uses more of the shaper curve.

[Lopyt]

One thing that might be a bit different about OS's distortion compared to other tools is the way the distortion volume works (the slider next to the distortion drop-down menu). This doesn't affect the amplitude of the signal going into the wave shaper. Instead it cross fades between the original undistorted signal, and a 100% distorted signal (this is also how the reverb volume works).

Changing the amplitude of the signal going into the shaper can be handy to produce different sounds, but I couldn't implement it that way due to technical limitations. If you want something like that, you can change the volume of the notes, because that volume is applied before the distortion. For example, check out the sawtooth bass in this sequence. You can hear the tone change as the note volume increases, because it uses more of the shaper curve.

This actually helps a lot, thank you