Dirt, grit, noise and buzz are bad right? Aren’t those all the elements you try to AVOID in the recording and mixing phase?

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Well, not entirely… Guitar vst plugins productionworks.

Inviting some of those big, bad buzzes into your mix creatively is a great way to give your tracks some character and make them more interesting to the ear.

While the leading authority on Big Muffs - Kit Rae’s Big Muff Pi Page lists 13 - where the additional ones are mostly very minor nuanced changes to the 7 core circuits I favour. For a long time I did not have quite the right grasp on Big Muffs, but Mike Vickery of Vick Audio fame sort of brought me smartly into the picture with his.

But which audio effects are best for your sound? And more importantly, how do you use them without ruining everything?

AmpliTube Metal — the voice of the Masters. AmpliTube Metal is THE definitive collection of gear for metal players. It features an insane number of the high-gain dream machines that define the raw power, tone and emotion that is Metal, and a mind-blowing collection of rare vintage and modern stompboxes. May 18, 2017 The response of your guitar to an actual Big Muff is going to be MUCH different than going into a plugin. I've A/Bed several hardware Big Muffs with the Triangle Muff plugin from Universal Audio (going into an Apollo Duo), and the real things blow away the plugin. The best Muff that I have is a Stomp Under Foot Violet Ram's Head. KEY TONE COMPONENTS - If you study the various vintage Big Muff Pi circuits and schematics on this website you will find a very wide variety of components values used from circuit to circuit, even among circuits in the same enclosure. Spread across thirty-five caps and resistors, it may seem mind boggling to keep up with how each of these these may affect the sound, but looking at the circuit. EHX™ Big Muff Pi™ An Electro-Harmonix™ Big Muff Pi™ Replica known as the BMP. This project covers most of the known transistorized versions of the BMP. The Big Muff OpAmp version can be found at the bottom of this page. The documents in this first section are shared by all versions. The new Electro Harmonix Big Muff Pi Hardware Plugin has been spotted online and posted to the offsetguitar forum. The slightly blurred image appears to suggest that this new Big Muff combines a plugin with hardware to perform multiple tasks with one piece of equipment. AD/DA, presets and more. In 1978, EHX briefly switched the design of its Big Muff Pi from its traditional four-transistor circuitry over to a design based around the more cost-effective op amps (integrated circuits) and with one less gain stage. The 25 best VST/AU plugin synths in the world right now: all.

Here’s some helpful ways to invite a bit of crunch into your tracks with VST plugins and other fuzzed-out techniques.

They’ll give you a more interesting sound and a whole new set of tools for making your sound more unique. Time to get dirty…

Choose a Crunchy Wave

The easiest way to dirty up your sound is to use a wave shape that is more complex than a Sine wave.

A basic Sine wave is clean and sound like this:

Pretty basic right? It needs some noise.

The solution? Choose a more complex wave to start with on your analog synth or in your DAW. Here’s what each wave type will give you:

Square Wave

The Square wave is brighter and noisier than the Sine wave.

Visually it looks like a series of squares with right angles.

Sawtooth Wave

The Sawtooth (or Saw) wave gives you a nice buzzing sound:

It’s easy to recognize visually: it looks like the teeth of a saw.

Choose either of these for the main oscillator of your lead or bassline synth. These raw waves will be great building blocks for a gritty sound.

Hot Tip: Add LFOs to give your dirtied-up synths some movement.

Do it: distortion, overdrive, fuzz

Distortion effects are your best friends when it comes to adding dirt and saturation to your sound.

Which pedal should I get? Overdrive? Distortion? Fuzz?

Those of you who play electric guitar will have to face this decision at some point: which pedal should I get? Overdrive? Distorsion? Fuzz? Any producer using a DAW and VST effects plugins has to think about this too.

These effects are similar because they all distort your audio signal. But they each give it a different flavour.

Let’s look at some of the differences:

Overdrive

This effect sounds like an amp being turned up until it clips and distorts. This gives warmth and crunch to the sound .

Think of overdrive as the more subtle and gentle version of distortion.

A classic pedal for this is the Ibanez TS-808. I mentioned in another post that there is a free VST plugin version for your DAW. Another famous overdrive pedal is the OCD.

Distortion

A distortion effect picks up where the overdrive left off.

Distortion is Overdrive’s heavier, more aggressive and more compressed big brother.

It messes with your frequencies more and sticks around for longer (aka has more sustain).

Iconic distortion pedals include the Pro Co the Rat and the Boss DS-1.

It’s nice and tasty when you use it well. It makes your sound wild and thick.

Fuzz

Fuzz is a rounded, more buzzy and warm distortion effect. It’s an intense effect that reacts to how you play. It was very popular with psychedelic rock in the 60s and then grunge in the 90s.

Legends in the fuzz pedal department include the Maestro Fuzz Tone, the Big Muff Pi and the Dunlop Fuzz Face. Many people love the Fuzz Factory Vexter too.

Throw any of these effect pedals on a clean guitar line, a lush synth pad or even drums and hear the dirty magic. Use either hardware pedals or VST plugins in your DAW.

Hear the dirty magic.

There are tons of distortion pedals and VSTs out there. When it comes to choosing one: trust your ears.

Test a few and see what works best for what you’re doing.

Crush Those Bits

Another path to grit glory is bitcrushing.

The bit depth of digital audio is its resolution (or quality). It’s the number of bits of information in a sample.

By sample I mean the sampling rate – the number of samples of audio carried per second.

Another path to grit glory is bitcrushing.

The more bits, the higher the quality of the recording. CD quality is 16 bits. Old school video game music (think 90s Gameboys) is 8 bits.

Lowering the bitrate is technically decreasing the quality. But you can achieve very cool sounds by doing it. Use bitcrushing to get an amazing grainy, metallic sound.

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Vintage samplers like the Fairlight CMI inspired generations of producers. The lower bit rate of these machines gave their sound a particular character.

Tons of artists caught on to the effect and started using it creatively. You don’t need a Fairlight nowadays: A lot of DAWs come with a Bitcrusher effect (it’s called Redux in Ableton Live).

Don’t be afraid to throw it on one of your sounds to hear what happens.

The Low-Down on Lo-fi Recording

Many producers will cringe at what I’m about to say. But creativity is about breaking the rules.

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Another ‘technique’ for gritty sound is recording in a low quality.

Take out your cell phone and record vocals with it! Or buy an old answering machine from the thrift store and use it to record to tape.

Adopt a Do-It-Yourself attitude and record with a punk spirit.

Add that recording to your mix. Add some effects (like reverb and delay). You’ll be surprised at how cool it sounds.

Why do you think so many labels are going back to cassette tapes? It’s about that unique texture, not about perfection.

The key is experimentation. This might not be right for you. The fun part of this approach is that it doesn’t cost anything!

Keep Track of the Grit

These tricks for adding distortion, dirt and noise will give character to your sound.

Start by adding little amounts of effects at first. Don’t overdo it. Listen back to your original sound to see if you like what you did.

Or choose only one sound that you’ll make gritty and the rest clean. For example dirty drums with a lush synth line.

It’s all about balance and contrast. You don’t want to end up with a wall of sound, a super muddy mix , or a bad master.

A little bit of grit goes a long way.

A natural overdrive and clean boost for the tone conscious player to enhance the original sound of an instrument and amp while retaining their essential character.

The Cock Fight lets you achieve that cool cocked wah sound without the wah pedal.

The Crayon is a versatile overdrive with independent Bass and Treble controls and an open frequency range that provides players with a musical alternative to customary mid-focused overdrive pedals.

The new Deluxe Bass Big Muff is the latest in the line of EHX bass specific effects. It delivers enhancements to the classic Bass Big Muff Pi that are specifically tailored to the needs of the modern bass player and gives you more tone shaping options than ever before.

Long revered for its sweet singing tone and violin-like sustain, the classic three-knob Big Muff Pi has helped define the sound of rock guitar for over 40 years.

Electro-Harmonix creates classic overdrive in a JRC4558 IC based pedal that’s as bold as New York City.

Germanium Distortion/ Overdrive. Combining four classic germanium transistors, the Germanium Big Muff Pi is the result of a focused modern design dripping with EH analog heritage.

With the price of vintage HOT TUBES soaring, countless guitarists have requested that we re-issue our 1970s CMOS HOT TUBES.

We took the Big Muff Pi circuit and simply shrunk it without changing its rich, creamy, violin-like sustain and sound.

Octavix delivers the definitive late 1960’s fuzzed out, octave up sound together with modern enhancements that update the classic concept.

Rich, overtone laden sound that doesn’t get muddy. Responsive controls that take you from sparkling, clean boost through brown crunch and all the way to thick, saturated hi-gain

A versatile, multi-instrument capable, stereo overdrive/distortion with a broad range of sound options and controls. With the Operation Overlord, whether you play guitar, bass, keyboards or pretty much any electronic instrument—-dialing in great drive sounds is fast and foolproof. Whatever your rig, the Overlord is your indispensable ally.

EHX re-creates the classic fuzztone pedal with the Satisfaction Fuzz, now updated with true bypass circuitry for optimum signal path integrity. /master-down-sony-free-vst.html.

Tone aficionados kept telling EHX’s Mike Matthews about a pedal that had achieved a lot of buzz because it was only obtainable at an exorbitant price.

Combines two sweet pedals—-the Soul Food transparent overdrive and Nano POG polyphonic octave generator—-in one potent multi-effect.

The Turnip Greens is a compact multi-effect pedal combining the award-winning Soul Food Overdrive and Holy Grail Max Reverb. The Soul Food delivers transparent sounds starting with clean boost and progressing all the way to intense overdrive. It’s equally adept at adding punch to a player’s tone, pushing an amp into saturation or in front of other dirt pedals driving them into new worlds of distortion.