Stereo distortion unit

…not hardware…but just to mention, if it comes to any kind of distortion treatment…

unfiltered audios’s newest plugin creation is sooo beyond all the trillion ways of distorted flavours on signals and reality…
i can’t believe my ears…

nope…won’t sell my analog heat…anyways… :wink:

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How is the rml? Love the sound but I can’t wrap my head around the stereo functionalities, left and right enter on two different circuits?

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Eh, it’s too clean and predictable. Distortion doesn’t work well when it’s 1’s and 0’s, sadly. One of the FX you can’t really model accurately.

Now that I have both a Sherman Filterbank and an AH, I can say that they’re both excellent but the AH is all about control at a surgical level, while the FB is all chaos. I personally would like a nice balance between the two, but having both kind of gives me that?

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The RML is amazing. It’s technically dual mono (and each side is a little different topology-wise) but you can plug into just one channel (mono) and it will split the signal to each side, effectively “stereoizing” it with each side having it’s own independent settings including LFO speeds (which can be very slow…)

I thought I would be using it for drums but it ends up on everything, gives movement to drones, pads, basslines etc.

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Did you know if there is some demo/video somewhere?

There’s very little demos of it anywhere. I imagine it’ll be like the Sherman Filterbank, where it took a long time for anyone to make in-depth tutorials in a studio setting.

There is this video from RML that really sold it for me though… you can see the potential when it gets to the sweet spot for both channels.

There is also this one on a basic synth sound:

And if you do get one try to find the “Serpa” version… those extra switches do some crazy sh*t.

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Someone really needs to do an proper demo like this for the JnH:

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There are some VSTs for distortion modeling that can give a pretty nice result (Soundtoys Decapitator for example) but they take SO MUCH processing. They eat CPU exactly because they try to be unpredictable… It sucks, you always end up having to bounce to audio or use it as a send FX…

I would love to hear some examples of drums (e.g. 909) and/or bass (e.g. 303) synths going through the aftershock pedal! :slight_smile:

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Yeah I mean I do like digital distortion in some cases, like for example the last two Low albums sound really gorgeous. But, as far as making a VST that would be indistinguishable from a distortion pedal goes, not possible. Distortion pedals, especially the wild ones are so unpredictable that there’s simply not enough processing power in computers yet to model them.

Here’s a pretty interesting paper on the subject, they come quite close, but still can’t model the dynamic randomness of distortion pedals, or a long chain where each pedal affects the others. Funny isn’t it? Distortion pedals are such simple devices after all.

http://research.spa.aalto.fi/publications/papers/smc19-black-box/

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Yes, I got an Allen & Heath ZED-10 exactly for this purpose. Especially channel 3 and 4 have a gain boost that’s designed to sound nice when overdriven. You can then send the channels at high levels to channel 1 and 2 for even more distortion. With the EQ’s on each channel (of which the mids are parametric) you can really sculpt the sound.

Obviously, you can use one channel for L and one for R, but if you just want more subtle saturation, you can also just use one of the stereo channels.

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Aftershock is long gone, but was a pretty impressive unit for digital distortions… the Jekyll n Hyde is the real deal tho :slight_smile:

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I just picked up an original Mackie 1202 (pre-VLZ) for this purpose and to be a basic keyboard submixer. I intend to overdrive the preamps but also use sends for feedback channels.

Interesting. I read that it has a built in noise gate as well, that’s really nice, but how fast is the attack time? Anything below 30 microseconds would be perfect. Otherwise it will cut the transients of drums…

I just looked up the manual, but it is barely a manual… More a patch examples sheet…

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I never messed around with the noise gate, because noise was the goal (haha)…

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Afaik you can’t use it in stereo! It’s not a stereo unit!
It’s either dual mono (but with one channel being one circuit and the other channel another circuit = no stereo compatibility) or in serial for mono signal.

You can read what I’ve posted above recently… it is dual mono technically but not normally serial… if you plug into only one input it can split the signal to both channels, and if you pan those make a sort of pseudo-stereo (highly useful)…

If you run a stereo signal into it it will process each side independently, which you can dial in with similar settings but won’t sound identical (distortion and filters are somewhat different). This is a plus for me though. When I had the Aftershock I made each channel different in the editor to get the kind of results that the JnH does normally… if that makes sense.

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That’s nice when you need such an efx but I mostly don’t

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do you know of any specifically that sound good?

Please give details about what you’re after in a more appropriate thread.