Back in the olden days, when music was still in black and white, and 'dubstep' was a type of chain mail armour, noise and distortion were the enemy - vast sums were spent coming up with the newest and best equipment to minimise any kind of hiss or unwanted clipping. Valves, gold plated contacts, the works. But now, since we can run synths into EQ's into Busses without ever even leaving the laptop, noise is no longer an issue. The perfect mixdown is finally possible. But noise and distortion are fun! Clicks and hiss can mitigate the boredom of the digitally sterile soft-synth! If you're really determined, you can even make an entire tune out of it. So let's take a look at some ways to dirty things up and maybe find some new sources of inspiration into the bargain.The real fun here is to be had pushing things as far as you can until something interesting happens. It's the opposite of the perfectly controllable digital environment; you never know what you'll end up with, and as a result you can end up with loops and sounds you would never have written otherwise.
Try, for example, taking a simple percussive pattern or loop a couple of synth notes, and run them hard through your mixer (even a DJ mixer will do). Record them back in, and you'll have a nasty distorted mess. Don't mind that though - take this mess and run it back through the mixer, and record the results again. Now run that back through the mixer, and keep going through the process of re-re-recording until your loop has been through the mixer ten or twenty times. It will have picked up a load of hiss along the way, but it will also have started to click unexpectedly as drum transients attempt to pierce the background noise, or created weird tones as synth harmonics mush up against odd circuit resonances feeding back (or even bleeding across channels).Take these sounds and you have instant FX loops for your track, perfectly tempo matched, and ideal for applying delay and reverb to layer up in the soundscape. Or, chop out some distorted clicks to use as a unique percussion loop in your beat, or take the distorted synth notes and make a sampler intrument out of them, or just layer the whole thing quietly in the mix to give a bit of character. Artists like Oneohtrix Point Never are masters at this kind of thing.
White noise itself can be incredibly useful - just look at Emptyset, who make whole techno albums out of it. Theirs is the sound of hiss and pure tones being jammed hard through desks and compressors, and it's loads of fun playing around with this kind of thing. Instead of just running the same thing through a desk over and over, try pushing some noise as hard as you can into a compressor and then whacking it with something like an 808 kick, and listening as the noise is forced out of the way by the huge boom. Compressors can start to behave very strangely when pushed to their limits, and you'll get strange transients, textures and sculpted sounds as the volume envelopes struggle to cope with the ragged noise they're having to deal with.Once you've got your bizarre noises and clicks as audio into the DAW, there's still a lot of randomness to be enjoyed. For instance, put a noise gate with a sidechain input on the distortion channel, and then set the input to be something a little more percussive to give interesting rhythmic effects. Or do it the other way round, and have random noise clicks triggering a pad or synth. Autofilters can give similar, random vibes, or you could go the whole hog for glitchy madness and apply a beatslicer plugin onto your distortion to really get things percussive and choppy.
It's difficult to give tips on how to get the best results out of distortion, as the whole point of it is to make machines do things they weren't supposed to do, break the rules, and just tinker around until something exciting happens. Which means there are a million different ways to approach the whole process. But that means that you can just have fun with it - there is no wrong way. So hopefully this article has given you some tips on getting started - now crank that mixer up to eleven and let it take the strain!
