Guitars tend to sound more distorted on a recording so always air on the side of caution. If you record with too much distortion then there isn’t an easy way to turn the distortion down when mixing. Don’t rely on the mixing process too much to get the tone you desire. It is important to get the recording sounding as good as you possibly can. By allowing the sound waves to interact with the air before being picked up and processed by the microphone brings the sound to life.

Using an amplifier and microphone or microphones to record your distorted guitar is still the best way to capture that live sound. Recording distorted guitar using an amplifier and microphone(s) I’ll explain how you do each of these in more detail below: You can plug your guitar directly into your audio interface or via a DI box and add distortion effects in your DAW.You can do as above but instead of using a microphone use the line-out setting on the amplifier.Then using a microphone or microphones to record the sound. Playing through an amplifier with either a built-in distortion effect or using a distortion pedal. You can either do it the ‘traditional’ way.There are a few different techniques and options for recording distorted guitars in the home studio. Overdrive tends to alter the tone of the sound less than distortion, producing fewer harmonics. So overdrive is basically a clean signal taken and amplified to a point where the soundwaves get clipped and you get the overdrive sound. It is the process of ‘driving’ the amplifier ‘over’ what it can handle. The term overdrive explains the function quite well. Overdrive refers to a specific type of distortion. What is the difference between overdrive and distortion?

Therefore, making all notes you play over a certain level compressed to the same volume. So instead of having a mixture of really loud and really quiet sounds, you have more consistent levels throughout.ĭistortion does this by chopping off the tops of the waves. In short, compression works by reducing the dynamic range of a sound. Don’t worry I won’t go into too much detail here ( for that you can head to this article I wrote). You may or may not be familiar with with the concept of compression in music. We crave this destruction of the soundwave as a fundamental building block of our sound.ĭistortion is technically a form of compression But in the guitar world distortion is a welcome friend! To the point where in some musical genres it is actually the norm. You may have come across it when you have turned the output gain up too high when mixing and pushed it ‘into the red’. So at many times in music hard clipping distortion is actually an unwanted effect.

How to distort audio