Rapidly Distoring Echo

Todzilla

New member
Hey folks, I have an effect in my head, but I'm looking for advice on the best way to achieve it.

The Effect: On a song I am producing there is a key word, "anger" that I want to echo about seven times. Each echo should get increasingly distorted until the seventh echo is unintelligibly saturated with distortion. I'm thinking of a kind of analog distortion, like you'd hear on a tape loop (an old Revox for my fellow geezers), but it needs to develop fully in only seven echos - much quicker than normal tape distortion. I've tried Valhalla Frequency Echo (which I love), but it doesn't distort quickly enough. I have NI Komplete and I've tried using the tape loop echo in Guitar Rig, but it doesn't distort quickly enough either, and it's too "hi-fi."

I figure I could just manually have seven iterations of the word and use automation to increase distortion from a plug in, but that'll take a lot of work and I don't think it'll produce the kind of distortion I'm thinking of - overloaded tape distortion that develops quickly, like only seven echos until it's totally distorted.

Thanks in Advance! I hope my description makes sense.
 
Yes, do it manually....since it's only echo/delay.
IOW...make your 7 copies of the word...space them out to taste on the track...adjust your levels per instance accordingly...and apply the desired amount of distortion to each instance as needed.
For added realism, add a touch of reverb to that track.

Oh...and why the need to "automate" the distortion across the whole track? Just apply it to each instance, which gives you more control....or put each instance on its own track if needed...and then you can always bounce down to one after you have it sounding the way you want.
 
The way I'd do it in Reaper is to find the saturation that I want to use, insert it on the track, split the item if necessary so that one word is on its own, the right click that item and "Apply track FX as new take" seven times in a row. Each time it will apply the same saturation to the already saturated "new take" it made last time. Then you can copy that item along the timeline as necessary and select the appropriate take for each and adjust each take envelope so that it fades out the way you want.

I know, that kinda sucks, but it gives you all of the control.

What you're asking for is not trivial. At least, I guess I'm assuming you want these repeats to fade out, and that's kind of the problem. Any sort of distortion is going to be a threshold based effect. It distorts because the input is too loud. Once it's done that, the result is not too loud anymore, so even if the feedback is unity, when it comes back from the buffer, it won't distort again, and since you're actually attenuating (so it'll fade out)... (Worth noting that this will be an issue with the iterative method above, too, but it should be easy enough to make sure the saturators output is higher than its threshold one way or another)

I don't think most tape delays really do distort more on multiple repeats either. They get more and more bandlimited and noisy, but to get more distortion on each repeat requires positive feedback, which of course means infinite repeats.

Unless you're willing to accept crossover distortion instead of clipping distortion. Then it's kind of easy...
 
I think he wants the whole track to fade out...not just the distortion.
He wants the distortion to progressively grow while the whole track fades with successive delayed repeats (7 of them).

So what I was suggesting (which is pretty much what you said too)...cut it up, apply the FX, fade out the track....would work. :)
It's probably about 10-15 minutes worth of editing....I don't see anything really too complicated about making it work...unless he's talking about something different than what I understood.
 
Thanks guys!

Ashcat, say more about crossover distortion...

You folks get the basic idea, although I just wanted this effect on the lead vocal, briefly. I can simulate it the way you each suggested, although it would be nice to use a dedicated plug-in, just so I would have more control over it. I've used analog tape echo plugs (the aforementioned Valhalla and Guitar Rig plugins), but they take too many repeats to start to distort.

Also, I'm looking not just at general distortion, but tape overload saturation style distortion. Maybe I'll look for a tape emulator and try to overdrive it?

FWIW, I use MOTU's Digital Performer.
 
:D
I think you get more control over it by NOT using a dedicated plugin across all the echos, which would be more of a global effect.
Applying processing individually to each instance and hand-tailoring it to taste will give you precise control.

That said, I know, we're living in that plugin world these days, and now there's plugins for like a million specialized effects as opposed to creating a something with various pieces of gear. I'm actually amused by the number of generally single-purpose plugs that get put out. :)

My old-school tape echo unit does this kind of stuff easily...but of course, it's all in real-time, and you might have to turn some knobs as it's happening...but then, that's what makes it fun and unique.
 
I don't know anything about DP. If it'll allow you to somehow create a feedback loop via routing, you can use any delay set to just one repeat and kind of do whatever you want in the feedback loop to mess with the repeats.

Crossover distortion is exactly like a noise gate that responds to the instantaneous (sample-by-sample in digital) level. Every audio wave goes "through zero" somewhere between tens and thousands of times per second. This would cut out everything close to those zero crossings. It basically tears the middle out of the wave. In this instance, as each repeat is quieter than the last, more and more of it will get ripped out, and it'll get more severely distorted. This is not a particularly musical or "good" distortion. If you're at all familiar with that special sort of gated, splatty, "mis-biased" guitar fuzz effect, it's kind of like that. It could be cool, but I don't think it's quite what you're looking for. I don't know where to tell you to find such a thing. I have a plug I wrote for Reaper, and with a feedback routing, I could make it happen. If you could find a noise gate that actually lets you set attack, release and RMS/averaging window to 0, AND make a feedback loop like above...
 
Wait. Do you actually want the repeats to fade out (like they normally would with most delays) at the same time as getting more distorted? It's not any easier either way, but...???
 
Yeah, I want a fade curve that builds to a crescendo, then fades. That'll be easy though, since I can just retrack the effect after I've perfected it, and put that recording on a track that I then put a fade curve on.
 
:thumbs up:

So all you really need are the 7 instances of the word...with gradually increasing distortion per each...and do that fade out.
Have you tried that yet...?
Maybe a nice tape saturation plug...and just bump it harder for each instance until you get what you want.

I was doing something along those lines on one of my songs that has a repeating chorus vocal line at the end where I wanted the song to fade, but as it fades I wanted only the reverb on the repeating vocal to keep increasing....so you get the fade-out, but with the long, cave-like reverb increasing on the vocal, as the song fades. I still wanted the dry vocal track to also fade.
To rough out that effect in the DAW, I just locked the main stereo bus faders to the the Aux bus fader that has the reverb for the vocals...and applied a "inverted grouping" to the two sets of faders, so that as one goes down, the other goes up.
 
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