I Can’t Believe I Only Just Figured Out Asymmetric Distortion

If you got past the title, then welcome to this post! Prepare for small nerd

Digital distortion is mostly ‘ugly horrible’*, compared to analogue distortion, but it always depends on what you’re looking for in the moment Hard-clipping, wave-folding, sample-rate and bit-rate reduction, complex wave-shaping… these techniques can not be implemented in analogue circuitry (that I’m aware of).

But folks try to emulate what analogue distortion does to sound in software all the time. Analogue distortion is ‘real’; it’s electrons passing energy to each other, and the management of that energy using resistors, capacitors, diodes and all those kinds of things. Distortion happens almost all the time in the electronic circuitry, you can’t emulate that stuff (but the developer can make it sound like he does by adding noise into the ‘analogue emulation’ by generating/playing white noise through the effect. (check out Waves ‘analogue’ switch).

Now that stuff is far on the horizon of my menial coding world, so I don’t bother with it. What I have understood for quite some time, though, is that when you affect both sides of the audio signal (the positive and negative) differently, different harmonic structures are generated and enhanced. Put simply, if you distort a signal in the same way, on both sides, you create odd harmonics (distortion which sounds like square waves, in a roundabout way). When the distortion is unevenly balanced across the polarity, even harmonics are generated (distortion which sounds like a saw wave).

I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to make something like this (too interested in delay lines and making music I suppose) and I’m surprised my brutal-ist coding style works so well here, but it ended up being fairly easy to construct in Plogue Bidule. So now I have my own asymmetric distortion device to test, use, and demonstrate, very clearly, how the harmonics are generated depending on the distortion happening either side of the zero-line.

I’ll stick a video up soon.

* not necessarily my opinion. In fact, I love digital distortion.