BERKLEE'S INTRODUCTION TO MUSIC PRODUCTION

AT COURSERA.ORGHi, and welcome! my name is John Tinjaca, I’m from Bogota, Colombia. I’m taking the

Berklee's Introduction To Music Production at Coursera.org  This lesson is for week 4, part of the assignment; I will be explaining:

Distortion with examples of cases when it can be musical or problematic

NOISE

When things are quite, you become aware of noises, they are everywhere even inside

you.

http://img2.themebin.com/hd-wallpapers/1920x1200/quiet_place_1920x1200color.jpg

Distortion (or warping) is the alteration of the original shape (or other characteristic) of something, such as an object, image, sound or waveform. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distortion)

http://sabrinaratte.com/

Distortion turns volume variations, into timbre variations. Above we see a pure sine wave tone,

Clean Sine wave

Now if we increase amplitude (volume) until reaching distortion threshold we begin noticing timbre variations and a shifting of the wave form.

Timbre variations

Changing wave form

When we distort sound, the wave shape changes, and upper partials appear, the sound will get brighter and the apparent loudness will increase.

robert doisneau optical distortion.jpg

http://freesound.org/people/drandarko/sounds/216021/

Distortion can be used musically, as for example with electric musical instruments, through the use of effects that create "warm" and "dirty" sounds by compressing the peaks of its sound wave, which results in a large number of added overtones. (source: wikipedia)

http://www.dv247.com/assets/products/60311_l.jpg

http://freesound.org/people/philsapphire/sounds/255812/

However, there are situations when you will want to avoid distortion, like for example recording a vocal performance,

http://www.kpu.ca/__shared/assets/norma2a12503.jpg

http://freesound.org/people/Ramston/sounds/262274/

TO AVOID DISTORTION WHILE RECORDING VOCALS:

• Carefully place the mic. Avoid distortion in those P and B sounds. (use pop filters.)

•Avoid clipping. (digital distortion)

•Carefully apply gain staging, stay in green at every point in the signal flow.

RESOURCES

• https://class.coursera.org/musicproduction-008/

•http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distortion_%28music%29

•https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZuSaudKc68

•http://freesound.org/

I tried my best to explain this subject, trying to cover the information in the respective lesson. I chose this lesson

because as a guitarist, distortion is one of the coolest effect you can possibly try to understand and enjoy while playing,

and is also a major musical characteristic of rock music, and I love that!

Please feel free to let me know what do you think about this presentation, and if there is anything I could do to make it

better, just let some comments, I will appreciate!

Thank You!

THAT’S ALL FOLKS!

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