LPHovercraft

I’m just now getting around to making the switch to OSX “Snow Leopard” which means that I’m reinstalling every audio application I own. There are a few exceptions to this, including applications that don’t support Mac and one or two others that have just fallen out of use. But for the most part it’s been a full reset, which has been a refreshing way to break out of the heads-down studio work and reconsider all of the creative options. Plus, MacOS has a really nice interface and I’m looking forward to using Nuendo 5, which is optimized for OSX 64-bit. Even though I know (and love, mostly) all of the audio gear from my days in “the Windows wilderness” it’s refreshing to see them presented in a new user interface – it somewhat makes everything new and shiny - like a new art exhibit in a classy gallery.

The process of getting everything loaded up and configured forced me to take note of just how many options I have at my disposal, and the plugins that fall into the “distortion” camp really stuck out. Aside from the tube saturation and cabinet emulator that’s built in to Cubase (which are quite good, BTW) there’s also iZotope’s Trash, Native Instruments’ Guitar Rig 4, Line 6′s Pod Farm 2, Scarbee’s Vintage Keyboard FX and Virtual Guitarist 2′s FX. You could even count the hardware – a Line 6 Pod X3 Pro rack unit and Arturia Origin synthesizer (which has its own external audio inputs and very good distortion FX on-board). And to go with that, several of the plug-ins have speaker cabinet and microphone positioning models to give even more “studio control” over the sound.

I suppose it’s better than a storage closet full of amplifiers, but it’s really striking to see how distortion completely subsumes all other categories of sound shaping that I have in my (virtual and real) studio. I was joking with a friend about whether you can have “too much distortion” – and of course that all depends on the amount of distortion and whether or not it’s intentional. In this context, the answer is “no”. I’m glad to have this “embarrassment of riches” available – as it will be an important part of putting the right kind of edge on the tracks I have slated. Over the summer I’ll be rolling out little snippets from the first album project (and you’ll see some of the artwork leaking out along with it). From round and warm tube tones to the bite of a broken transistor, distortion will certainly be the order of the day.