Hey...if he likes that sound, OK...and there's all kinds of distortion/clipping flavors...but I find that when you overload cheaper solid state components into clipping, the distortion is kinda ugly for my taste, and very unflattering, compared to say, tube distortion or tape saturation...which have more "organic" flavors...
...but again, if he likes it, then it's good for him.
Yes agree, but some people swear by the distortion/clipping characteristics of the built-in pres of a 90's Mackie mixer (I'm not joking ). Especially electronic music producers, they love that stuff. Daft Punk almost single-handedly made the "so bad it's good" Alesis 3630 desirable. Just look at lists of greatest compressors of all time... the 3630 is included in almost every single top 10.
Back to the OP:
another one is to play with the pitch control whilst recording or recording at half speed/double speed then changing it on playback.
Or using really old worn out tapes (wow and flutter for days).
In fact, I have an old cassette walkman that actually has stereo line in recording capabilities (this is quite rare). Man, the tape transport on that walkman can't maintain a stable speed to save it's life .
I used to quickly print rough mixes to this machine on cassette after a recording session then plug it into my car to listen on the way home. Just the vibrations from driving in the car with the walkman on the seat makes the playback go all wow and fluttery with a fair bit of HF loss. Actually a pretty cool effect. I tried to replicate it in the final mixdown on some of the songs at the time with the two machine tape flanging effect but it wasn't the same and ultimately went for a 'clean' mix.