Let's really dig into Rytm's gorgeous distortion...what is it?

[ecthroi]

yussss sounding dirty and groovy, love it

[RhythmDroid]

Just hearing this now…phuckin mentallll!

[Davy_Jones_Locker]

@sezare56

germanium

Anyone know if this distortion can be emulated using a VST? For example, does Arturia COLDFIRE get close? It has a Germanium mode.

[sezare56]

@Davy_Jones_Locker

Anyone know if this distortion can be emulated using a VST?

Some say everything can be emulated. Judge with your ears, context, in the mix.

As a guitarist, for recordings now I prefer Amp/Cab digital simulations than using real amp / cab / mic / mixer…
(I also tried Torpedo things to get real power amp textures without cab. Heavy setup !)

To my ears analog preamp / overdrive / distortion can make things more alive, before an Amp / Cab simulator I won’t use anymore. So to be clear, I much prefer analog things in that concern (before Amp / Cab simulation)

So I’d recommend to try a real germanium fuzz and compare with plugins.

[bgEN]

When I was a young child, I was told over and over, “You NEVER want DC offset!!” My auntie would always be normalizing and (DEFAULT) correcting DC offset (RECOMMENDED) everywhere we went.

Isn’t DC offset bad somehow for speakers?

[avantronica]

@bgEN

Isn’t DC offset bad somehow for speakers?

There likely won’t be much of it left on the ac coupled outputs, but the exquisite scars in the audio will still be evident

[phading]

Is there any more information about this symmetry crackling/silence/chopping/gate effect?

When adjusting compressor settings, It almost feels like I’m controlling a gate effect, the way atk/rel change the silence/chopping duration times.

I found the following threads/posts. This reply from @Ess is the most important one to keep in mind, as there is a lot of misinformation - people claiming there’s distortion/symmetry after the compressor - denied by designers at Elektron.

Maybe somebody has something else for me to read on this subject? Thanks!

Comp volume affects distortion

Patience, patience… So… I asked Mattias, who designed the distortion circuit (and much of the analog circuitry in general) - the signal flow is correctly stated in the manual, and the distortion (which is what the symmetry affects) is indeed before the final gain stage. However, a compressor/final mix stage is naturally dependent on its input - if you send a DC offsetted signal into it, you might hear some DC clicks when adjusting the Level parameter for example. This is completely no…

Nice visual from another topic (Compression and Distortion settings - #6 by glitched):

@glitched

Before:

With negative SYM values and extreme MUP setting:

Dist 'SYM' control ? Noise floor panning

Can somebody explain a bit more about what this actually does ? Does it effect which part of the sound gets distorted ? I’ve noticed turning it to quarter past can kill unwanted noise floor in certain sounds. Oddly over headphone I find turning this, or the Comp’s ‘mix’ encoder can make the noise floor introduced pan left or right. What is going on there? This is over headphones btw, you may not hear it on monitors.

[phading]

@RhythmDroid

If this offset pushes the waveform far enough off the “centerline” then there won’t actually be any “oscillation” occurring until the waveform tips cross the centerline…which they will do given a large enough waveform

I was just now having exactly the opposite experience. Low volume audio passes through, too loud and it crackles&silences (which explains the gate effect behavior of the compressor, which I can guess was keeping the volume low enough to pass)