I guess I just need to vent about yet another annoying nitpick in Elektron gear because I know there’s little chance this will ever get fixed, but…
Have you noticed that the track/AMP overdrive knob’s behavior is kinda weird? As soon as you dial in the knob even the tiniest amount from zero, the effect very clearly moves from “zero distortion” to “holy hell the 3rd order harmonic is just -12db from the fundamental”. After that the entire 1-127 knob range is just a very slow, very gradual further amplification of the harmonics.
It’s like a car that jumps to 80mph at the slightest touch of the gas pedal, and the entire rest of the pedal just gives you an extra 10mph. And it just makes me go “…WHY?” as it makes so little sense.
I actually really like the sound of the overdrive, and for that reason would love to modulate it’s entire range for some “smooth non-overdrive to overdrive” presets, but the knob range/functionality just basically destroys any possibility of that.
This feels like a bug or an omission to me, but Elektron’s track record of touching things like this is not good, and I guess they would be afraid of patch backwards-compatibility if they ever changed it. So, join me in being sad/angry for a moment with full knowledge that this won’t ever change?
yes, this is the behavior from day one on DN for me too, I think twice if I want to enable it at all, I don’t think it’s a but but yeah even with 0.01 it’s almost becoming square rather gently adding, I suppose it’s not a bug because this was mentioned quite a few times on the forum so it’s a known behavior…
no need being angry though, you can add a feature request and maybe it will change but personally I don’t think it will, it’s just one of these quirks I’ve accepted and I know that if I’m after cleaner tones I just don’t engage it, but if I’m after dirty sounds then it’s distortion time…
it’s the same algos on both the syntakt machine and overdrive side, so no surprise (unfortunately).
It would be so cool to make sine-based patches that smoothly use the overdrive for upper harmonics, but engaging the overdrive immediately just puts you permanently in square wave territory with no in-between.
There’s varying degrees of clipping a sine wave. What it sounds like is the harmonics being quieter.
Like I said, as soon as the overdrive turns on (at <1 value) the loudest harmonic generated immediately jumps to -12db compared to the fundamental. That’s crazy loud.
I don’t have a Digitone anymore, don’t remember it being that much of an issue on low volumes. Is there a relation to the level of the sound and the overdrive? Maybe turning down the sound volume (not track volume) might decrease this effect.
Not saying you’re not hearing what you’re hearing, I just don’t remember it being too aggressive and I’d often go to 50%+ at times.
not really, well it might but you’d need to significantly to lower amp/track volume and then you go into the noise floor, on normal levels there’s no real difference.
you can see it’s the same distortion it’s just going into the noise floor and stops being audible, but even 0.01 give all these harmonics, when having more complex sound it’s VERY noticeable.
yes! it sounds like a hard clip, and when you do that to a sine, two sharp edges appear, resulting in harmonics like in the pictures above. i believe thats the same method that old yamaha chips used.
jump from 0 to 0.01 sounds harsh because no matter how small you make the cut at the top of the sine, there will always be 2 sharp edges (math?)
while the master overdrive is more conventional and computationally heavy, since you only need to run it once, and not per voice/operator. (at least thats my theory)
i love how smooth and full DN sounds, so i generally avoid amp overdrive. but its really usefull in a busy arrangement, as it changes body of the sound a lot, making it stand out.
Imagine the single sample sitting on the top of the crest of a sine wave. Clipping that single sample “downwards” one bit isn’t going to create a huge harmonic spike yet, although the harmonics do quickly start building up when you push the signal further.
There’s plenty of hard clipping plugins that allow for much, much more gradual effect than the DN overdrive, there’s really no scientific impediment here at work.
