 Have you ever seen a YouTuber demonstrate a saturation plugin and as they switch it off and on you can't hear any difference. You are not alone. Hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you're well. It doesn't really help that people like me use vague terms like warmth, color and character when we're talking about saturation and if you can't actually hear it you may understandably come to the conclusion it may all be a hoax or at best much ado about nothing. Well I'm going to guarantee two things to you by the end of this video. Firstly I'm going to describe exactly what saturation is without using any vague terms at all and secondly you are going to hear the effects of subtle saturation by the end of this video perhaps for the first time. Now before we get into that I'd like to thank our sponsor for this video DistroKid. Follow the link in the description down below and you'll get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music to the world. Now let's answer the question what is saturation? Let's use an analogy here I have a creative sauce t-shirt and here I have a bottle of water. Now if I squirt this water onto the t-shirt a couple of times we would say it's wet yeah but it's not absolutely sort of full of water it hasn't reached its capacity to hold onto water. Now if on the other hand I take this t-shirt and I dunk it in this bottle of water off screen here and lift it up you can see that it's completely dripping now it's exceeded its capacity to hold on to water it is saturated and that's how I want you to remember what this word means. Now in audio equipment when particular components reach or exceed their intended capabilities we would say they are saturated. Now typically this will occur with things like magnetic tape or tubes or valves depending on where you're from and transformers. Now when saturation occurs in these components there are two main byproducts. The first is soft knee compression and the second is harmonic enhancement. Let's talk about soft knee compression. I'm going to be using two free plugins to conduct an experiment. The first of these is a tone generator which I'll be using to generate a sine wave a really simple sound. The second plugin I'll be using is M compressor from Melda Productions and I'll put links for these in the description down below in case you want to play along. Now the good news for you is we don't actually need to be able to hear the sound of the sine wave to conduct this experiment and that really is good news because they get pretty irritating after a while. So what I'm going to do first of all is gradually increase the volume of the sine wave and although we can't hear it we can see with the metering on the right hand side that we have both an input and an output level and note that they currently match each other okay as I turn the input down the output goes down by the same amount and vice versa as I turn it up it increases by the same amount. This is what we would call a linear response. Now that's happening at the moment because I haven't changed any of the any of the other settings on this compressor. So let's turn our sine wave down and I'm going to start off by adjusting the threshold on the compressor. I'll pull it down fairly low here and you can see the point at which this is happening. I've already set a ratio of two to one okay which is why we say see this change in this line here okay. So below the threshold nothing will be happening above it we will see some compression happening at a two to one ratio. Let's just see that in action as I push the volume of the sine wave up look at the metering on the right hand side currently they match and then as I approach and then cross the threshold you will see they no longer match. The input is increasing and so is the output but not by the same amount anymore okay. So that is basic compression. Now because of that sudden change around the threshold we call this hard knee compression. I guess it's because this is like the shape of a knee yeah okay. So let's change it to soft knee compression. So I'll click on soft at the top here. I'm just going to gradually increase the knee size and look at what happens around about the area of that threshold. We can see that line is softening there's a curve there now and now as we push the volume of the sine wave up at lower volumes we can see that the input and the output do match but as we approach the threshold we start to see a slight change between the two okay. Then we'll go over the threshold and that change or the difference will gradually increase until we reach that full two to one ratio setting that we have at the moment okay. So I think you can appreciate even by looking at this if you were listening to this it would be much more difficult to detect the point at which the compression kicks in because of that soft knee because it's gradual okay and that's probably the reason why it's difficult for us to hear when that soft knee compression is happening as a result of saturation. Now I want to make really clear here I've not used saturation at the moment for this compression okay. We've just used this compression plugin to demonstrate what a soft knee compressor is but what I want to be clear about is compression doesn't just happen as a result of saturation with compression hardware or compression plugins it can happen with all kinds of different hardware and plugins as a result of saturation. So that's the first byproduct of saturation. Let's move on to the second byproduct which is really exciting in my opinion and that is harmonic enhancement. Here we have our sine wave again but this time it's represented in a spectrum analyzer and as we can see it's a really simple sound and that's useful because as we add saturation to this it's going to be easy for us to see what's being added. Now you still can't hear at the moment because it's still muted. If I were to unmute it it's still possible that you wouldn't be able to hear it depending on what speakers you're listening on. Perhaps on a phone speaker for example it would be difficult to hear and that's because I've said it at 100 hertz a fairly low tone. The only reason I've said it at 100 hertz is for some easy math later on okay. So we've got our sine wave here now let's add some saturation. I'm going to be using this plugin this is from iK Multimedia and it's the T-Rex white 2a modeled on a really famous compressor the LA2a. It's bypassed at the moment so let's go back to our analyzer and we're looking at our sine wave now let's switch on that compressor and as you can see some sound has been added to this very simple tone and in fact what's been added is harmonics okay we can see them all here. Now these are sometimes also referred to as overtones. Normally we would refer to our original sound there the sine wave in this case as the first harmonic or we often call it the fundamental okay this is the kind of root of our sound and then we have harmonics in this case added at 200 hertz 300 hertz yeah then we have one at 500 hertz then one at 700 then one at 900 okay notice how they're kind of nice neat multiples of our original 100 hertz. Now also notice their distribution some of them are louder than others in this case the 200 hertz harmonic is the loudest and they sort of gradually decrease okay as they're added along the frequency spectrum. Now that is the harmonics added by this particular plugin let's try another one we'll bypass this one and this time I'm going to use this plugin this is the t-rax black 76 based upon the very famous 1176 compressor so again it's bypass we'll go back to our simple sine wave and we'll switch this compressor on again you can see that harmonics have been added but their distribution is quite different we have one at 200 300 400 500 hertz etc but you'll notice in this case whereas before the 200 hertz harmonic was the loudest one in this case it's the 300 hertz harmonic which is the loudest one okay and it just has a very different distribution. Now if you were listening to this which I promise we are going to listen to some of this a little bit later on you would notice that they had a different sound a different character that's where this word character comes in okay and that's because we've added harmonics maybe the same harmonics but certainly at different levels okay now before we do get to listening to this I need to talk a little bit more about the nature of these harmonics there are basically two types of harmonics odd and even if we take our original sine wave conveniently set to 100 hertz and we create harmonics by using multiples of two four six or eight then the results would be even harmonics because the numbers we used to multiply were all even numbers whereas if we used three five seven and nine to multiply the original tone then the results would be what we would call odd harmonics. Now the interesting thing is we perceive these two different types of harmonics in really different ways with even harmonics we tend to perceive them as more subtle more round even more musical whereas with odd harmonics we perceive them as a bit more gritty and aggressive. Now as we saw earlier with different hardware or different plugins there will be both of those types of harmonics in there but there will be a different distribution and that will be the difference in the way we perceive the character of the equipment. So I think it's worth noting that although we look at three prime sources of saturation those being tape tube and transformers in a real piece of hardware there may be multiple components which are adding to the character of that saturation and in fact odd and even harmonics will exist in all of those types of hardware. Of course the distribution is what really affects what we would call the character and for example if there are a lot of lower harmonics being added with saturation we may feel that it's added a little bit more warmth because we tend to associate lower frequencies with warmth. So interesting to note that I think you still need to use your ears to get the result you want but you can make some sort of generalizations. So as we can see we can use saturation to change the character of a sound but we can also use it to make something a little bit more prominent in our mix and that's because it is introducing compression which helps us to push a sound a little bit more forward in a mix and also it's adding that new frequency information which may help to expose that instrument within our mix. We can also use saturation during the mastering process where it's really really valuable in fact and can make that difference before you finally release your music and of course if you do want to release your music I highly suggest you use DistroKid they make it super simple you just upload your WAV file and your artwork fill in a simple form and they do the rest they get it out to Spotify iTunes Amazon what have you and it's really a breeze to release your music to the world in this way. So why is it that you've been struggling to hear saturation sometimes well I think there's three main reasons first of all that soft knee compression we were talking about is by nature sometimes quite difficult to hear because it's gentle okay and that's why you may not have picked up on it. Secondly it may be that you're not driving your hardware or your plugins with enough gain remember we have to push some of those components to their limits before saturation occurs. Thirdly the original sounds that we're listening to are actually complex even before we use saturation. Let's take one note on a guitar for example you just pluck that one note there's a fundamental there but there's also some harmonics in that note that's actually what gives a guitar its character the nature of those harmonics okay now we don't normally just play one note on a guitar often we'll be playing for example a chord we've got a whole bunch of fundamentals there and a whole bunch of harmonics associated with them when we now add saturation we're often just enhancing already existing harmonics and that's why it's actually a little bit difficult to hear sometimes. Now I don't want you to be despondent I'd like you to think of it by this analogy imagine the accent of the people where you normally live or a place where you've lived for a long time okay now imagine that along comes a Hollywood actor and they do an impersonation of that accent okay now for many people around the world they may think oh that's great they did a great accent but for you you may think hang on it's not quite right and that's because you've spent years and years listening to that accent and you're very tuned in to the nuances of the sound of that accent I think that developing your ear in audio production is a little bit like that it takes experience it takes exposure to different sounds before you really start to hear sound in a lot more detail so please stick with it now let's hear some of the effects of saturation so I've got my headphones on and I hope you will do the same either use headphones or studio monitors because we're going to be listening to some harmonics which are being added by saturation and you may not pick up these differences if you're listening through a phone speaker now we're going to start off with a sine wave again as you can see here this time at 200 Hertz and I will be switching the plugin on and off and you can see at the moment the harmonics which are being added but now let's have a listen to them now don't worry at the moment as we switch between the plugin being on and off if you can't hear the difference we'll get to that at the moment but you may be able to hear the difference let's have a listen so I would describe that as fairly subtle okay we've got some sort of lower harmonics being added there at a fairly low volume if you like so if you couldn't hear the difference that's fine if you could let me know in the comments down below but this time let's isolate the harmonics okay so with this EQ I have this low cut filter it's set very high at the moment I'm gradually going to move it down so that you can hear just the harmonics okay I'm not going to let you hear the fundamental so let's do that now so congratulations I'm sure you could all hear that and perhaps for the first time you are hearing the harmonics which have been added by a saturation now let's gradually blend in that fundamental okay have a listen again hopefully you can still hear the harmonics but now you can hear a bit of the fundamental and finally the sound there was starting to be dominated by the fundamental so oftentimes the reason you can't sort of easily detect them is because the fundamental is so much louder in comparison to the harmonics that they are there just fairly subtly but that is what is being added by the saturation in this case so I hope that that has helped to demystify saturation for you and you'll have a much better chance of identifying in the future I recommend start making use of it in some extreme ways and in some subtle ways as well when you are using it subtly do remember that I believe it can take some time for your ears to kind of tune into these things so don't be worried if you don't really hear it right away now one of the other mysteries in audio production is compression if you're finding that difficult to understand then I recommend you watch this really old video of mine right here thank you