Distortion v Saturation What's the difference

The Good, The Bad & The Ugly.

With all these new tape emulation plugins currently saturating the market, no pun intended lol, it would seem to the uneducated that this is the magic fairy dust your mix has been waiting for. Lots of mis-information being branded about and for those who never worked with the real analogue tape machines the hype is being somewhat over hyped to say the least.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying these plugins are bad, but knowing a little bit more about how analogue tape was used, may shed enough light to help you be more subjective as to whether you need to slap one on your mix, or individual track insert at all.

 Now distortion and saturation can get quite complicated if we delve into the world of mathematical equations in trying to explain what they both do respectively but I would like to take a more simplified approach so everyone can understand without the need for owning a degree in quantum physics. So deep breath, here we go;

Distortion.

"Digital" and "solid state" clipping (Distortion) are essentially the same thing, hard cutoff of the top and/or bottom of the waveform. Lots of people are doing this to their final mixes using huge amounts of limiting trying for the loud mix (the dreaded loudness wars). This turns the waveform, of your mix, from having nice healthy transient peaks to a solid mass block wave form. You may have loudness but you certainly don't have dynamics anymore. Thankfully this trend is seemingly near it's end and we are getting back to the dynamic side of audio rather than how loud you can make your mix.
 Loudness sounds best only at first but it will finally become tiring on the ears and you will switch off quicker. Dynamics on the other hand sounds initially quieter but due to more natural fluctuations in the sound, it is pleasingly less tiring to listen to. If we were to volume level match a mix, one going for loudness using limiting and the other with less limiting leaving the transients more in tact, no hard cut off, you will choose the best sounding mix as 'the more dynamic one' every time. But don't trust me listen to Ian Shepherd (Mixing Engineer) show you in this video example 

click link here; Loudness v Dynamic.

Saturation. 

Tape Saturation, on the other hand, is much smoother, much like a vacuum tube going into saturation - waveform peaks are "smushed down" rather than suddenly cut off. It's still distortion, but doesn't have as ragged and piercing a sound as does the hard clipping of transistor and op-amp circuits. Because there is no hard cutoff, of your wave form, and the transients are more folded over, it sounds more pleasing to the human ear.

What's the difference.

 Think of Distortion v Saturation this way, the best analogy I can give is this, Take a slice of bread, now say you don't like crusts, you take a sharp knife and cut the edges off, that's distortion. Sharp hard cut edges. Take the same piece of bread and pour water onto it until it can soak up the volume of water no longer and it gushes out through the softened crust, that's saturation. Watery soft edges.

 In the 60's they didn't use compressors and limiters as much as we do now (maybe just on a master bus or tracking vocals like Lennon did with a famous Fairchild 660) - the medium (tape) itself did the trick for the most part. Tape gave natural compression and saturation both caused by tapes own limitations.

Examples of use.

So how can these two effects be utilised in Studio One? In the video below I will give two classic examples, one for using distortion and the other for saturation. These are not the only ways of using distortion or saturation but they are definitely the most common used, and  frequently applied in the world of mixing audio.