Support
Looper's Delight
|
Support |
|
|
I've been following this thread avidly because I am currently in love with distortion, fuzz and overdrives in my own work lately (and have spend stupid money that I didn't really have buying up stomp box pedals in the vein). I totally hear what both Krispen and Bill are saying, viz a vis, the fact that heavily distorted guitars over heavily overdriven amps at high volume can cause a compression of both volume and a compression of timbre that can really both limit nuance and dynamics and also, potentially, hide poor technique. At the same time, I'm not a guitarist (though I own several) and I don't tend to think like a guitarist. I have neither skill or nuance in my 6 string playing, but I do think like a multi-instrumentalist and a composer and I love the timbral range that is available with all kinds of different distortions, overdrives, feedbackers and fuzzes. If I was only playing guitar in my peformances, then I think I would probably avoid the kind of tones that can potentially put Krispen and Bill off of Nels Clines' sound. As a composer, though, I find his sound absolutely fascinating, sometimes, specifically because it IS linear and non dynamic. I've also found that it is efficacious in some composing to juxtapose musical lines that are very uni-dynamic against things that are much more so.........the resultant contrast makes for interesting and very musical results. Trent Reznor has been really good at this: using very monolithic sounds (compressed to hell frequently) and then using a ton of dynamics in his vocals or in the rest of his arrangements (even just controlling the volume of his heavily distorted sounds in his mix) Lately, I'm most attracted to sounds that are ridiculously overdistorted........almost to the point of obscuring the melody being played. I recently produced a very small Noise Festival and used my Olympus recorder to record my sets and the set of Bryan of Rape Shower fame. I wasn't able to check my settings and the entire thing clipped horribly with digital distortion................arguably the ugliest distortion found. To my delight, I went back and listened to some of Bryan's tracks which, in a digital sound editor looked like solid black. He had started his set out in a cool way , just playing an old blues song, fairly straightforward before launching into a very loud and aggressive noise set. The blues tune, distorted to square wave clipping sounded really cool to my ears. Again, as my brother so wisely said, everyone has their own aesthetic and it's valid. I just wanted to put it out there that there is a lover on this list of stupid overly distorted sound. A student of mine who I just turned on to the My Bloody Valentine body of work said, "...............I'm also rethinking distortion now; I've never heard so much color in distortion before!....." Noise and the noise-esque sounds you can get with radical combinations of distortion are the equivalent of White light. They contain hundres of sine waves. To me the after the effect processing of such sounds can yield really subtle and even quite melodic work. Yeah verily!