 Hello, OslaterSync here. If you've followed me on YouTube for a while, you'd be well within your rights to assume that big, washy, ambient reverbs, or maybe delays feeding back to infinity were my favourite kinds of effects. And while they're high up in the pecking order, my first and truest love will always be distortion. As far as the videos I've made for this channel go, I feel like I might have been neglecting my number one. So today I'd like to put this right and dedicate a whole video to distortion, clipping, saturation, and the like. Talk about what it is, what it does, its varied flavours, and how we can approach using it in the world of electronic music. As it's the world that I feel most inspired to work within, this video will mostly be spent exploring these ideas in the hardware realm, but they apply equally in the box and actually, to introduce some of these key ideas, it's going to be easier to start in software, so let's head over there now. I want to start by talking about a type of distortion, which I think is probably the easiest to visualise and conceptualise, which is pure digital clipping. And to that end, welcome to Pure Data or PD for short. It is a graphical modular DSP programming environment. You don't need to really worry too much about what's going on here in order to understand the clipping part of it, but if you are interested in checking out these programmes, I will put a link to them in the description of the video. In digital audio, all sound is represented by a sequence of numbers, and those numbers dictate the shapes of the waves that are recorded or played back, and therefore what we hear. We usually think about these numbers as going from a particular positive number up down to a particular negative number, but there is a minimum and maximum number that can be represented. And if you try to push a waveform beyond that minimum or maximum number, rather than going any higher, the numbers will clamp to the particular minimum and maximum, and that will shear off the top or the bottom of the waveform. So let's take a look at that. We've got a sine wave here, which you can see visualised here. We can also see down here we have a spectrum analyser, so we can see a single peak here, which is the fundamental frequency of this sine wave. This control here is going to allow me to add gain to this sine wave, which will essentially, to begin with, just make it louder. I'll just turn down the master volume here so we don't blow our ears up. And as long as I don't try and amplify this sine wave beyond the minimum or maximum that I have set for this system, it will just get louder. We'll just hear a louder sine wave. But as we push this towards the maximum, which I've just set to be one as it happens, so still a sine wave. And then eventually, if we push it a little bit louder, there we go. We've pushed it beyond the maximum loudness that this digital system is going to allow, and rather than it getting any bigger, instead, it started to shear off the top and the bottom of the waveform, which has essentially changed the shape of the wave. And as that wave shape changed, we could hear a change in the frequency content. There's no longer just a pure sine wave. There are upper, brighter harmonics being introduced. And if we push this gain higher and higher, pushing it further and further past the limit, we can hear that we're getting a complete change to our sound. And if we push it high enough, we see all of these new harmonics starting to get introduced. And eventually, we get a square wave, which I'll just turn down there. And we can see all of these additional harmonics here. We can see this sine wave because we've pushed it past the maximum value that we're allowed in our digital audio system. We now have a square wave. So in this case, clipping our sine wave is introducing more harmonics, more frequencies. It's making it a brighter sound, which is kind of like opening up a filter. It kind of has that vibe to it, even if that's not really what we're doing, rather than us having a filter which was taking away high end. Clipping it is introducing the high end. And in fact, if we just connect this up here to here, this is just a really simple envelope that I've created. So rather than having it on a slider, it's now going to be an envelope. And this is going to sound a little bit like us sort of opening up a filter quickly and let it decay, right? A similar sort of vibe. We're not cutting out frequencies. Instead, we are introducing frequencies at the top end. Of course, the nature of the clipping is going to be different depending on what our input is. So rather than this sine wave, let me just unplug that from the system and instead plug in this sawtooth. I'll just also turn it down a little bit because sawtooths are a little bit harsher on the ears. I'm also going to just quickly do that. Don't worry about that just for a second. And we can see here that we've got a sawtooth wave much richer in terms of its frequency content even than the square wave. But if we go to amplify it past that clipping point and start to shear off the tops and bottom, we again get a new waveform and a different sound. Now, the interesting thing when we've taken this more harmonically rich waveform and clipped off the top and bottom is that it's not really getting any brighter per se. Instead, the emphasis of the frequencies that are in there is changing as we go between a sawtooth and a square wave. So when we are clipping things, we're not always making them brighter necessarily, but we are changing the relative frequency amounts that are found within them. Now, just for your interest, one of the other things that we can do with clipping is rather than clipping things equally on the top and bottom, we can apply an offset to a wave so that it lives more within the top end. So closer to plus one or closer to negative one, which means that as we apply gain, only one side of the waveform gets clipped at first, which means we get a different shape and therefore a different sound. And check this out. What does this look like as we start to move this waveform that's being clipped up and down? Apply a little bit more gain. Hey, look. It's pulse width modulation. So one way to get a pulse width modulator all square wave is to start with a sawtooth wave, distort it, and then apply a DC offset to move it up and down, therefore clipping each side of the waveform differently, which is pretty interesting, I think. So when we clip really simple signals like a pure waveform, we are just changing the wave shape, which gives us a new sound. What's interesting is when we start to work with more complex sounds, so here I've just got four different sine waves or going at different frequencies, as we start to distort it, we start to become more aware of another aspect of distortion, which is that it is not just about a tonal change, it's a dynamic change as well. So as we push this towards clipping, we can start to hear almost like a rhythm. So what's happening here? Well, all of these oscillators are running at different frequencies, but there are going to be points within the cycles of each of these oscillators where they are reinforcing each other and pushing it harder above this clipping point, which starts to introduce rhythms based around the dynamics of our sounds within the sounds. So often when we start to apply clipping to signals, we start to hear interactions between sounds that were not necessarily obvious when we listen to them normally. And as we push this harder, you can hear this beating that lives within these frequency relationships that weren't necessarily obvious to begin with. And again, if we were to offset this signal, then we would get a different flavor. And actually, because of the complex interactions that have been created by the harmonics generated by the clipping, we almost start to hear notes which weren't there before. That note there isn't actually in our input. It's just being created because of the relationships between these frequencies and the way that they are being clipped. Again, nothing beyond clipping and offset is being used here. But we're finding new sounds within our sounds, even within the simplest form of distortion, just shearing off the top of a waveform, you can find these very complex relationships. Finally here, I've got a loop, some piano and some choir samples here, a far more complex signal than the oscillating, beating sine waves that we had before. And as we start to clip off the signal, again, with this more complex input, we start to hear more complex interactions from within the sound that the clipping is making clearer to us. We're getting tonal and dynamic changes, which is one of the things that is so magic about distortion. And again, we have our offset here that we can apply clipping one side more than the other, what we sometimes call asymmetrical clipping. We get different flavors and emphasis moving towards the mid-range. And we get granted very harsh sounds, or sounds that we hear as being harsh. But you are emphasizing all of those interesting interactions. And if we just take a simple filter, take out some of that harshness, but keep those interactions, I think there's a real fragile beauty that we start to uncover within our source that we might not have otherwise heard. You may have heard these sorts of sounds being used by the likes of Nine Inch Nails. That's where a lot of that interesting texture comes from in those sorts of tracks. Distortion, finding these new relationships within the sounds that you wouldn't otherwise hear. But hey, let's head over to some hardware, shall we? The hard digital clipping we just heard affects the input signal in a precise, easy to predict way. The process is a purely linear mathematical one. When we move into the realm of analog distortion or digital distortion, which is modeling it, the relationship between the input signal and the distorted output becomes a lot more complex. Most distortion circuits are based around electrical components operating at the edge of or even beyond their intended parameters. This introduces all kinds of nonlinearities and quirks into their operation, which can be affected by the input signals, volume, frequency content, the impedance presented by the instrument plugged into the distortion, even the temperature. There are many different ways to build a distortion circuit and each of them introduces different kinds of nonlinearities. In some cases, simply switching out a single component in the circuit like a different transistor can vastly change the way that the circuit behaves. The world of distortion pedals then is like jelly beans, hundreds of different flavors because of the different circuit designs. Some of them are fairly similar but subtly different. Like you might prefer toffee flavor over caramel, but either will probably do if you're after that rich, soft, dark sugary taste. Then you have those huge contrasts like caramel and sour lemon, where you'll probably be craving one rather than the other. These three pedals here were kindly sent over by Empress FX in order to help me demonstrate what are probably, broadly speaking, the three major flavors of distortion pedal that you might come across. What I'm about to describe are broad generalizations and there's more of a Venn diagram than distinct separate entities. But represented here on the desk, we have a overdrive pedal. Overdrive pedals tend to be a lower gain or the lowest gain of the major types of distortion pedals. They are often designed to compliment the input signal rather than completely transform it if you'd like, a word that you see associated with some overdrive pedals is this idea of transparent, which is a badly defined word in terms of what we're talking about here, I guess. But that generally means is that you can kind of hear the original sound that's being plugged into it, usually a guitar bow in our case, it's going to be a synth, but with that sort of fur and grit around it. Moving up the chain of gain from overdrive pedals, we get to the generic distortion pedal, not this particular pedal, this particular generic has to be said. Distortion pedals tend to be higher gain than overdrive pedals. They tend to be more transformative of the sound, more of that waveform getting crushed and changed. That being said, distortion pedals are usually designed in such a way that the input and the output of the sound is a little bit more sculpted in the frequency domain, which means that it's, although very high gain, tends to be quite well behaved and controllable. Often a sound that you might associate with distortion pedals is that smoothing of the way for whether there's maybe lots of high-end energy in there, it's kind of in a smooth way compared to some other types of pedals, which brings me neatly onto the third broad flavor of pedals here, which is fuzz. Historically speaking, fuzz pedals actually came first. They tended to be designed around more simplistic circuits, although that's not always necessarily the case these days, but the way that they achieve their gain, which is usually even higher gain than the distortion pedals, was much more the misuse of the components, which led to more texture and unpredictability. Fuzzes tend to be the most unruly of all of the pedals, much more dependent on the input as to what they're going to do, so whether they can react fast to transients or not, there might be squashing and spluttering sounds that you associate with fuzz, much more textured, unpredictable, but that could be where a lot of the real character can be found when you are looking at distortion pedals. As I say, those are sort of generalizations, and as I was here talking about sort of textured sounds with the fuzz pedals, you may well find, as we might find here with the germ drive here, that actually the idea of textured sounds could be found in overdrives or distortions. So we're talking about a Venn diagram here, and there's often significant overlap in some of these ideas, but I tell you what, let's stop talking and actually hear them, shall we? So I've grabbed the main log here because I wanted something that was sort of a good basic sound for us to crush, and I've got patch here which is just a single triangle wave. You can hear there's a little bit of fluff on the main log's triangle wave, but otherwise that is a sort of clean sound as it were. The filter is wide open, the envelope is opening and closing instantly, and it's only one oscillator, so really basic sound. So let's see just on single notes what each of these devices, set as they currently are, are going to do to that sound. So let's start at the lowest gain here with the germ drive. We'll just turn that on. I've got the gain fairly low on this. And on those single notes, you can hear that the sort of basic sound of the synth is not being completely obliterated. Just a little bit of, I guess what you would call sort of fattening some of the top end is actually being rolled off there a little bit, and there's a little bit of warmth, fluff, sort of low end distortion happening there, which is very pleasant on those single notes, just to sort of create a more low-fi sound. So let's move up the gain here to the heavy here, which is our distortion, and we'll just use the heavy channel, which is the lower gain of the two channels, but still pretty high gain. I've got the gain set pretty low here. You can hear, even with that lower gain, a massively more transformed sound as opposed to the overdrive. And especially, I guess at the lowest and highest, that you can really hear those upper harmonics being introduced there. I'm intentionally not playing chords at the moment. We will get to chords, don't worry. I'm moving up once again to the fuzz here again. I've got the gain set fairly conservatively here. So let's have a listen. So just reminding, that's our original sound. So again, we're hearing much more transformation. It's sounding a lot more square wavy. You can also hear, especially on these lower notes, maybe if you go even lower, that there's kind of a texture to the sound which wasn't so obvious on the distortion. Cool. So that was just single notes, but as we saw when we were playing in pure data, when we provide distortion more complex inputs, so in our case, maybe chords, we get more complex interactions that might be more interesting. So let's give that a go, shall we? So what I'll do initially, I think is just build up like a major chord like that just to see how these different pedals affect more complex inputs. So here we go. Let's try the Germanian drive first. So we just have our little warming. Let's try that in different octave. That's lovely. That's our input. I love what that's doing to the sound. All of those interactions between the different frequencies are being emphasized and where there are little misfireings in the tuning of the synth, because it's VCO based, so there are slight tuning issues between each of the next part, what gives it its quality, its character. They're all being emphasized in a really lovely way. I think you're rewarded with more simple relationships as well. Like that fifth there just gains whole other world of sound. Anyway, let's try the same thing with our distortion. Things get very crunchy. Very crunchy indeed. Let's try simpler relationships again. These high notes are really popping. Hmm, interesting. Little bit crunchier. Little less able to be reeled in, I think. Let's try the fuzz. Same idea. That square wave sound immediately. Hmm. I really love the Germanian drive though. Let's try that with a little bit more gain. Shall we see what that does as we turn up the gain? It's got that kind of almost Hammond organ distortion thing going on there, which is really cool. All of those relationships between those notes. Just the little fluctuations in frequency and the way they're beating against each other. Lovely stuff. So something I was just doing there, which sounded pretty cool, was sweeping the gain control as almost like a tone control, a change of the timbre of the sound. But of course we can do that in our sense by modulating the amp envelope. So if we have the volume of our sound swoop in and then swoop out with the gain turned up high, it's going to be basically the same as us turning the gain knob up and down and getting that timbre will change. Let's set the gain a little bit higher here. Let's set kind of a paddy swoop to our sound here. Something like that will do. So the clean sound now sounds like this. Just a basic triangle pad sound. No modulation or anything on there. Only thing we're doing is sweeping the amp envelope. Now with the gain turned up higher on our pedal now, going to get a bit of noise because that's the nature of higher gain devices. Now we should hear that we get a timbre change, not just a volume change. That's a cool sound. Let's try that with a sore teeth wave instead, see what that sounds like. It really sounds like there's a filter on there, right? The way that those additional sounds that are being sort of faded in then affect the overall tonality as well. Almost like we're getting ghost notes that aren't even being played, fantastic sound. And remind it, this is what we're actually playing. Let's try that with the fuzz, that gain. Almost like this, almost like guitar feedback. The way that those notes fight against each other. Let's try some really high notes, see how that sounds like, some really low notes. And again, just as a reminder, that's our input. And it's all about the sounds being smushed together into one cohesive whole, while at the same time the smallest changes making kind of bigger differences as well. A great example of small changes making big differences. On the min-log, we have our shape control. It's actually a wave folder on the triangle wave. And if we modulate that, that's our input. These paddy patches that we've been playing with on the min-log are of course fun, but a classic way of using distortion with synths of course is to smash up a bass line. So we could take this sort of pseudo 303 friend here and we could engage one of our distortion pedals and get something a lot more fun and interesting. And what's really great about distorting these sorts of bass lines is that we still have this idea of the small changes making big differences kind of thing. So as we adjust our filter settings and our filter envelope settings, it has a much bigger impact, which is all fun. But that's more fun. That's just that without the distortion. That's where the fuzz, see the fuzz is introducing so many additional harmonics. Oh, that's cool. That's the input. Mad, right? Almost not audible, but with all that gain, almost sounds like there's a pitch change, like there might be a feedback inside the fuzz circuit that's being tweaked by, wow, that's our input. Almost like a kick drum pitch envelope. Yeah, that resonance is really messing with it. So cool. Overdrive is a bit a lot more well-behaved. Still adding loads of vibe. Again, almost inaudible without the distortion, but it's absolutely part of the synthesis process here. So let's try some distortion with a drum machine. So I've got the drum boot impact here, which does have its own distortion circuit built in. That's only one flavor of distortion. And as we've seen, there are multiple flavors to be had. So this is the sound that I've got going on here, just a beat that sounds like this. All I've tried to do here is create a beat, which has a combination of space, but also stuff which is overlapping as well, because that's where we'll be able to hear what the distortion is actually doing. So let's try the germ drive, first of all, with a low gain. Just, it is just immediately better, right? We give it a bit of distortion, bit more texture to the low end. And essentially, we're doing compression to the drums, which is something that you would tend to do with a drum machine anyway, so you would compress it to get a bit more punch to it. We're kind of getting that for free because of the distortion. Dynamics a bit squashed, but you still got the thwack of the kick there nicely. Give it more gain. Yeah, as we start to increase that gain, first thing that I noticed straight away is that the kick drum has got more of a tone to it now. We're hearing the note, if you like, of the kick a bit more. Because of those upper harmonics being emphasized, we've got more of the note information to grab hold of. The things are getting a lot more squashed now as well, and I think what's really interesting is if you listen to how the hi-hats and the kick and the snare are interacting with each other and fighting for space in a really cool way. Like that. Kick snare again there. That snare sound at the end there is actually the same as the snare in the middle, right? But the way that the kick and the snare are fighting for space within distortion makes that second snare, the one at the end, that one there sound completely different to the first one. Much more spitty, because that low-end energy from the kick is still there distorting things when it's happening. Let's try a different pedal. Let's try the heavy now, the distortion. Here you can hear what I was talking about right at the start when we introduced the pedals. The distortion pedals tend to filter the input and the output a bit more than say, fuzzers or overdrives to constrain and control what's going on. Everything here is a little more mid-focused. Had the highs turned down a little bit there, but. The overdrive is more sort of full range. A lot more mid-focused with the distortion here. Still really cool things going on. Little toms in there now sound really, really cool. Whereas they're a little bit lost in the drive sound or even with the overdrive. Like that second low tom at the end there you can barely hear with the overdrive, but with the, this might be a really cool sound to mix in with the overall sound. The nice thing on the heavy, and we'll talk about this a bit more in a minute when we look at samples, but we also have this weight control which is a sort of pre-emphasis of the low end. So it's not an EQ at the end, it's an EQ going into the pedal and it means that the low end is going to sort of have more effect on the distortion. So we turn it up, check out what happens. We get more low end, but the way that that low end is distorting. So cool. Those low sounds, those low toms and the kicks are completely in control of the whole vibe of the beat now. As we push that up even more. By emphasising those lows going in, and of course we do this with a filter before the distortion, which we'll do it with the samples in a minute. The kicks take precedence over everything else. Completely transforming it. That pre-emphasis of the lows, so cool. Yes. Wow. Let's leave the fuzz a go as well. I think I've got the gain cranked here. You can hear that the pedal barely hanging onto the sound. Like everything almost sounds like a compressor is opening up after the kick. It's only once that kick has died down that there's even any space for the sound to come through. And those toms are really electronic now. If we don't crank it as hard we can get similar ideas to what we have with the other pedals but Really transformative, completely changing dynamics of the sound, not just the tone. Because distortion is dynamic and tonal. Great stuff. Now, a lot of the cool artefacts that we're getting there is because we're running the entire sound into the distortion and each of those individual sounds are then affecting each other sort of within the distortion. But in a lot of cases, that might not be what you want. Maybe what we were getting with the kick drum is really, really cool but we don't want it completely stepping over the hi-hats or maybe the real low-end weight that we were getting with the heavy is taking away from the snap of the snare or something like that. Well, if we have a development well, if we have a device or if we're just working in a multi-track environment where we are able to distort different parts of the sound differently we can get very different results to distorting it altogether. So here I've got a setup, excuse all the wires everywhere where I have currently got this beat as before and the output is just going into the fuzz here. So we've got this vibe going on here. So everything is going through here. So everything is interacting with each other but perhaps it is that we don't want maybe the kick and the snare to be affected by the other sounds or to affect the other sets. So what I've got around the back here is some cable setup so that I can send the kick through the overdrive and the snare through the heavy here. So let me just plug those in. So now I have it set up with the kick going through here, the snare going through here and everything else, the main outputs going through here. So if we hit play we basically get our original sound as it were but now we can distort the different bits individually so they're not all stepping on each other. So if you want to get that crunchy snare you can get it. If we want to get that big distorted kick and if we want to bring in that other distortion on everything else but now each of the I guess the two main elements of the beat are not stepping over the others. So that's with things done separately and that's with everything distorted together. Now we can mix and match how those all work and we can affect them separately and we get more flexibility by distorting things separately. The flip side of that is that we potentially lose some of that character of the things interacting with each other so it's kind of what are you trying to do with your distortion at a particular time. And we can take a similar idea with the individual outs and apply it to melodic synth patches as well. For example on the distortion here although these sort of individual notes sounded really great when we play them individually perhaps when we layer them up into a chord things were a bit much but of course in a multi-tracked environment in our door or even to tape if that's your thing we can take this sound and break up into its individual parts and layer them instead so we could take and layer them up. So just a little change of scene here over to the module. Let's talk about another way to use distortion which I think is really interesting. So I have here a mono loop being played back. So this is just the clean mono loop unprocessed and what I want to talk about here is using multiple distortions to create stereo images from a mono source. So I've got Terci Marina here from Noise Engineering which is three distortion circuits in one tiny little module. It's a great module. And what I've done is I've taken this mono loop and I've patched it into one of the inputs of Terci which mounts across the ones below it and I've taken the output from two different distortion circuits into the left and right output of my system here. So if we turn down the mono original here and now here the same sample, mono sample being processed in stereo by both sides of Terci here and you can hear here that it's gained this really quite wide stereo image and I think there's probably some phase stuff happening in here but because the two distortions are grabbing on to the front-ended notes or pushing up the back end of the reverb in different ways and there are different frequencies that have been emphasised within the distortion we get this quite interesting wide stereo image from our mono source. You can hear the reverb is lingering in the left-hand side and the front-end of the notes are getting squashed a lot more on the right-hand side. The right-hand side is a lot more about the front-end of the note and the left-hand side has become more about the tail of the note and it's a really interesting way to up the stereo width on a mono source. I promise you this is still a purely mono source and it'd be interesting to see if we just put the mono back down the middle as well that would be interesting. So a mono source which we have very much turned into something a lot more stereo I think that's a really interesting way to approach making use of multiple distortions and just while we're here in modular land I've just patched this patch up and it's based around just the triangle wave being sequenced here it's just a straight triangle wave and I've molted that into a bunch of low-pass gates and those low-pass gates are going into different channels of terse here and with that we can take that one sequence because each of the different distortion circuits are going to shake the wave differently by pinging into each of them as a low-pass gate so we can get a stereo sort of multi-part baseline going on here so we've got that one there and that one there and we've got this kind of multi-part thing it sounds like there are kind of three different sounds going on here but they're all just the same sound being distorted differently and then if we add in, you know, we can get somewhere right just off a single triangle wave being distorted three different ways so one thing that's always really interesting to distort is samples samples especially loops like this one already have a lot of those complex interactions built into them for the distortion to take hold of and find all of those interesting clashes for it to emphasise and pull out those new sort of ideas what I want to talk about in particular here rather than the samples per se is the power of pre-filtering your input in order to fine-tune what you're getting from your distortion so I'll use the jam drive because I think honestly it's my favourite and one thing we can hear pretty immediately there is that the low notes, those low frequencies which carry more energy are distorting more and kind of obscuring the other parts of the sound case in point just there to the detriment of the sample I think so one thing we would probably think about in the case of this sample if we wanted to have the crunch but maybe a bit more clarity is to take out some of the bottom end before it gets the distortion pre-filter what we're doing here so let's try that on the diggitact here we can come over to the filter page and we can take out some of those low end and although those low notes are blooming a little bit into the distortion everything is a lot more controlled just by taking out some of those low frequencies here we're able to get the character of the distortion without those low notes completely obscuring the other parts of our sample and we can use this idea to emphasise other parts of the sound to make them distort more as well we can bring down some of the high end here as well and maybe emphasise some of these instead perhaps that's something we want to make a feature of instead and how those twingly highs aren't going in there so much so perhaps if we were working with the furs instead which naturally emphasises a lot of those high end harmonics more we might want to focus more on the mid-range we might find when we come over to the distortion here which pre-shapes its input a bit more although it's blowing out the bottom end a bit it's not as blown out as it was with the overdrive which is a more full range input so the distortion as we've discussed tends to pre-shape the input to take out some of those low frequencies so that we don't get that massive blow out on the low end so much even without any filtering going on on the dig attack here still some emphasise at the low end and nowhere near as much as there was on the overdrive here but certainly a different flavour of distortion and with the gain low, yeah, just a little bit of crunch so pre-filtering your sounds to make the best of them for your particular distortion device is something that's definitely worth considering as Furnace messing around with dirt pedals is there are definitely some things to bear in mind as you explore this universe of gain the first thing I'd like to mention is that most of these pedals are designed for use with instrument level inputs guitar pickups generate a voltage in the low hundreds of millivolts electronic instruments like synths tend to operate at line level which will usually be up around one volt what this hotter signal means in practice is if you want to get the full range of gain from a dirt pedal you'll probably have to turn down the synth or, as I did with the individual outputs on the drumbrutes run attenuators before the dirt pedals uro rack levels are even hotter and while you're probably unlikely to damage a pedal with these levels I'd definitely play it safe and run an attenuator before the pedal or get a dedicated pedal interface tangentially related to this some classic fuzz circuits are designed with a load impedance presented by a guitar pickup expected on the input so they may misbehave with something like a synth plugged in usually this means sounding very compressed lacking variation across the gain range and a bit congested or gated which might be your thing but it doesn't limit the usefulness of it circuits based around the fuzz face design for example will often behave this way next up most, if not almost all distortion pedals are mono devices this might not matter to you depending on the synth you're using it certainly wasn't an issue for us today on the mini log and the drumbrute but if you want to have uniform distortion across a stereo source especially relevant on drum machines with panning I think then your options are pretty slim the only two I can think of off the top of my head is the operation overlord from Electro-Harmonix and if you count them at the electron analog heat and also the palm but those two do represent a pretty large jump in price you can always work around this with running each side of a stereo source back out through your audio interface after tracking or indeed just using two distortion pedals but if you're looking for stereo dirt in a live rig options are slim on the ground I for one would warmly welcome a stereo version of the GermDrive Empress if you're listening please in your rack we definitely have a few more options especially if we factor in VCA's that will overdrive the ruiner Versio from Noise Engineering and the neat little guillotine from Ritual Atronics come to mind but I'm sure Modular Grid will point you towards a bunch of other options the other problem for us synth types is wow there are a lot of distortion pedals out there I wasn't joking with the Jelly Bean analogy there are hundreds upon hundreds of options out there and frankly not that many of them have good demos for electronic instruments available online hopefully this will change over time it's worth checking out guitar demos at least to get a feel for the game range or any special tonal features of course many of these issues go away if you're working in the box where gain staging stereo plugins and an easy way to trial sounds exists and there are a huge range of distortion plugins out there just as there are pedals there are also many plugins out there which seek to emulate specific real world pedals so this might be a great way to get a feel for what works for you before shelling out on the hardware units I hope you enjoyed this little exploration of dirt and electronic instruments and maybe it inspired you to go and experiment with distortion in your own music as always if you enjoyed the video a like is massively appreciated and make sure you're subscribed to the channel so you don't miss out on any upcoming synth fun until next time take care bye bye