I hope viewers can appreciate that this information is incredibly relevant _well_ beyond just music. Signal process is fundamental to so much of physics and engineer. Well done, sir!
Just about every piece of electronics can be described as a signal transfer function like that - it was honestly a better explanation than my lecturers
This is much better than most TH-cam videos, like Paul Third's, where they dont fully understand what they're talking about and either give information that's incorrect, or information that is strangely myopic and missing a lot of relevant information.
wow, the part about quarter-wave symmetry and odd harmonics was definitely a mind-blown moment. Also perfect level of difficulty. Thanks for the university-level education!
your tutorials have substance man. I watch a lot of tutorials online and this was the one first one that actually told me what exactly those fancy graphs on waveshapers are. Thanks!
Thank you for making a video covering this topic that does not dwell in half-truths and oversimplifications! This is easily one of the most misunderstood topics in audio engineering and most gear/plugin makers are not helping one bit
I'm an electrical engineer that started doing audio stuff and I've been surprised by how much engineering stuff applies to audio. This video introduces you to the concept of Fourier Series in a waay more interesting way than a college lecture.
If you go down far enough, everything can be described with math. So, it's not that surprising that the more technical you get in any field, the more you start top see the overlaps. I mean, mechanical engineering and marathon running at first seem to have nothing to do with one another, but if you want to develop an ideal gait to optimize speed over time, you're going to start running into all the same issues that you do when designing an optimized machine.
that play on words at 11:25 is worthy of a subscription. I really like seeing the cross between math and music that these videos cover, keep up the strong work!
After youtubeing for a long long time and coming across countless semi-useful and plain useless production videos, I ended up getting to know this channel, and let me say, you are by far the best one. Clear, well done, technical explanations, graphics to understand better, and especially USEFUL tips on key aspects of production. Awesome!
Love this. Been studying sound design for a year independently and this is one of the most informative videos I've ever seen. I've come back to this over and over again at varying levels of experience and find a deeper understanding each time! Bravo!
So I randomly clicked on this video to fill some time while I was busy and couldn’t actually search for anything specific. But instead of mindlessly listening for a minute and switching to something else. I was enjoying and thought I should leave a like and finish the full video. By the end of the next minute I was fully distracted by the video, not finishing what I was doing or looking for anything else to watch. By the end of it, I had decided it would be a crime to not subscribe and leave a comment for engagement of the TH-cam algorithms. Awesome video, you made a ton of concepts I have tried to learn and never fully understood, super intuitive and engaging. How you explained and visually showed the information was the perfect tools I needed to actually have it click in my brain. Please continue more of these. They are great. Thanks for reading my Ted Talk about the inner workings of my adhd brain, moment to moment. ❤
4:59 this was really an eye-opener for me. I always imagined that less "sine-like" waves had more frequencies because more dramatic deviations from sine meant higher frequencies. This is a much more elegant way to think about it. A lot of the information you've presented in this video was stuff I had to spend a long time finding, largely because most production discourse revolves around "buy this plugin" and "use these samples." It's amazing to have all this information distilled into one source. Thank you!
Your videos bring back so much of my university memories back. I learned all this theory in the past and mathematics but it was before I started producing music. It was just another formula I needed to learn off for an exam back then. Thanks for putting so much depth into these videos they are really good for getting into the weeds of that is actually going on.
I am literally rewatching the video I watched half a year ago, because this is huge!! Especially, when having the new videos on saturation. Love you, man❤️
As a guy with a bachelors in mathematics I really appreciate your approach to teaching this material. Very different from most other things online. Right up my ally
Amazing video. I just found your channel after producing as a hobbyist for 3 years. Now that I’m getting comfortable with the basics, I’m glad to have a resource for more technical ideas that I feel ready to engage with.
man, the amount of depth in your breakdowns is amazing. i'm just starting to grasp at the technicalities of music and you've fed me so much more information in such a well put together format. thanks so much dude
Dude, where did you learn all of this stuff lol. These are some of the best videos I've ever seen. I have a hard time understanding the complicated stuff, and I'm still not sure EXACTLY what's going on, but you do an extremely good job of explaining things, and I'm learning things in your videos that I've never seen in other tutorials. Thank you
@@lex4478 well then the answer is probably on google. not that complicated. the tricky part is to search in physics terms because its complicated to find in depth information on audio effects, but signal processing is exactly the same so no big deal
I have a degree in electrical engineering and I was very impressed with the mathematical accuracy you used to describe all this. Subbed, would love to see other music production techniques described in this way
Nerd talk is always welcome. On the subject of saturation, it might be worth mentioning the differences between simple plugins based solely on waveshaping and the physical phenomena actually taking place with tape or transformer. The nonlinearity of inductance based components is more complex and more difficult to simulate than active components like tubes or transistors.
"It's a little... convoluted." I see what you did there! I did a fair bit of signal processing in my time, but I still learned a lot from your video. Thanks!
Thanks for this series. I'm subbed to many channels but this might be the first time I've ever hit the notifications bell. This channel is going to get huge, and deservedly so.
"The best-sounding distortion comes from properly processing the sound before you even send it into your distortion" is eye-opening, as was your previous video's tip about (paraphrasing) "The more frequencies you remove from a signal, the more headroom you gain to drive the remaining signal into your saturator". You're clarifying these ideas in a way that fills in the missing links between theory and application. Psyched for the next video.
This video is great. I've been making music with guitars and synths for 50 years, always thought about this stuff but never put the time into studying it. And here you hand it to me in 17 minutes. Thank you! A more basic discussion would probably make sense to a lot more people - even my eyes started to glaze over after 13 minutes or so. Consider doing something similar about flanging and comb filters. The big thing for me was at the end when you mention intermodulation distortion. Finally someone said it! I've never heard a single person bring it up, and it's SOOOO important. Intermodulation distortion is where all the magic is. You play a guitar note through a cranked amp and you hear a clean note. Play two notes and all these other overtones happen. I thought I was the only one who noticed. Thanks!
This is how a video is done, not just the what, but also the why. Breaking it down from the fundamentals. Way better than any other video i've seen on the subject Thank you! Keep it up! I will keep watching for sure.
YOUR VIDEO DIDN'T ONCE ASK FOR LIKES OR SUBSCRIPTIONS, THANK YOU I've wanted to make a video about this stuff for like two years but you have more information to share and better visuals than I could manage, great job. I'd like to see a video just touching on how input volume has a major effect on distortion; you mentioned fuzz and the craziest thing about many classic guitar fuzz pedals is that lowering input volume actually reduces distortion without making the output much quieter. Granted that's more a result of how the components react to the electrical signal than waveshaping, but I think that's still a huge part of the process which people overlook.
Thank God, a video about audio stuff that actually explains things. I love being able to watch a video about music and not have to roll my eyes constantly.
this is so insanely good. my brain feels so understood.every craving for possible explanations or examples is satisfied before it can come to conciousness. 4 mins in and i learned so much that i havent learned in 13 years of dealing with music and watching production videos from time to time. i cant even express this properly right now. gonna go watch other videos on your channe afterwards.
its almost like an advanced AI sampled the way my brain understands those concepts or modelled them and then gave it to my brain that lives in the past with a 30 minute delay.
What a video! I had a major backlog of Production videos I went through, roughly 150, and your 3 videos are hands down the best in that list, it's not even a contest. This concept in particular took me a few re-watches to really grasp, but you did such a great job laying out and depicting the core relationship between Even and Odd Harmonics, and how to maintain the Fundamental Harmonic, and what happens when you use Asymmetric Curves, it's knowledge really worth treasuring and I'm so grateful you put the likely massive effort required into describing it so well. I'm extremely interested to see how these concepts apply to Intermodulation Distortion, in particular towards things like Distorted Guitars. Thinking about such a concept and how it relates to massive walls of Guitars makes my head spin and I'm wondering if there is actually a method to the madness of making all of that work in Harmony or Dissonance without an excess of the other. Thank you so much for this invaluable resource! To say I'm looking forward to your next video would be a understatement.
As an audio educator, I'm happy to finally see a well-produced video on the topic and bummed that you beat me to the punch. My only critique is that of the label "saturation" being used as the umbrella term for all types of distortion. I do feel general "distortion" is more appropriate due to the bredth of the definition whereas "saturation" has a more specific connotation and specific use-case - it's (traditionally) just soft clipping. Either way, your content is sound and your presentation, on point, excellent, and I love it. Keep it up!
thank you! I actually thought about this quite a bit. The word 'saturation' as it originally applied to audio referred to magnetic saturation of tape which is when an increase in an applied magnetic field doesn't increase the magnetization of the tape in a proportional way, which gives rise to soft clipping. The term was then used to describe any soft clipping (tube, transformer, etc.). But nowadays I think most people use the word 'saturation' to mean any nonlinearity. While it's technically not saturation, words change over time and I think it's the most commonly used. I chose to not use distortion since linear distortions exist (i.e. phase distortion), and I didn't want to confuse people since I'm just focusing on nonlinearities in this video. Anyway thanks for the comment! 🙂
@@sseb_music I see your point. Thanks for the clarification and the thoughtful reply. It's a relief seeing videos that are a notch above the rest in the quality of actual science behind the subject. The world needs more of this, imo.
DUDE.... I've been using graphic distortion and saturators for years, and had a pretty decent intuitive understanding, but I honestly learned SO MUCH from this video!! Thank you thank you thank you!!!!!! Can't wait to dive into more of your content!
Man... I love how detailed and deep this video is. Going into the science of how things work is awesome, and including maths gives a deeper level of understanding. I know that's not a popular opinion but maths is vital for breaking real world phenomena into easy to manage thought experiments. I am loving your channel and content, and find that in a sea of beginner oriented channels that have very little left to teach me, I am learning a hell of a lot from yours. Please keep this up .
You not blowing up, leads me to believe many of the consumers of TH-cam music production education were stupid, and are still stupid. They just couldn't hang, no matter how much crayon and macaroni you tried to cheerily, expertly, respectfully, and concisely spell it out with. You rock man. Thanks so much for these!
Dude, you really need to just do a video on Fourier theory and get it out of the way. Give as little of the math as is necessary, but don't hold back. People will get it. It'll make it a lot easier to be talking in the frequency domain instead of in the time domain from that point on out. PS - You're killin' it. Keep it up. I also can't wait to hear you get "convoluted*. Admit it: you've had some hardcore engineering or science training. I'm guessing BSEE or BSME, but Math or Applied Math or Physics or maybe even Chemistry are all possible, too. Theoretically, even CS, but you seem too cool for that one. Just a guess. Tell me I'm wrong. 😉
Fourier is coming! We're slowly working our way there, but have to build up more of a foundation first haha. Thank you for all the kind words on my videos! And yes, I dabble in STEM from time to time ;)
Great video. You clearly explain the mathematics while relating it to what we hear and perceive. You should make more videos that get into the weeds of signal processing like this!
Definitely a niche sub-topic, but I'd love a video comparing application of saturators in different routing orders. i.e. applying a saturator before vs after reverb, short delay, or a phaser
Fun party trick: You can make a saw wave using a sine wave and a saturation function, of course. But if you apply a saturation function to a saw wave, you get back the exact saturation curve that you applied, repeated every wavelength. Bonus trick: This means you can encode any repeating sound as a saturation curve.
@@starfishandroid Yes, I am indeed saying that! Think about it this way: A saw wave is just a straight line going from the minimum value to the maximum value over a particular span of time. If you scale value and time into the range from 0 to 1, then a saw wave is f(x) = x. It visits every possible value in the range, in order. Which means if you apply a saturation curve to a saw wave, it visits every point on the saturation curve in order. Which means if you use a sound waveform as the saturation curve, that means it visits every point in the sound waveform in order. Congratulations, you have invented a weird way to do waveform synthesis! I've actually done this in practice. The HTML5 audio functions don't have a way to specify a short repeating waveform for an oscillator to play, but they do have a sawtooth oscillator and a distortion effect that works by specifying a saturation curve.
Please make more vids. These are incredible. There are few out there, with this level of depth. You are answering all of my questions, but as I'm sure I have unanswered questions I didn't ask, I would like to see more content, please.
Having watched a video from this channel earlier, I was unsurprised by the fact that this was incredibly informative and concise whilst still containing some occasional humour. Awesome stuff.
WOW! I always wanted to discover what’s under those tool we normally use, like saturation, equalisation and compression, and finally I found someone who explain that in a deeper way than basically all the TH-cam tutorial. Thank you so much for these videos, please continue to bring these tipe of format, I’m learning A LOT. 🙏🏻 In addition, I would suggest you to make some videos where you implements those theoretical concepts in a mix, for example, because yes, now I know way more than before on what saturation does, but I wouldn’t know where applying the right type of saturation. Thank you, again, for the attention (ye it’s a pretty long message I’m sorry😅) and have a good day!
You're absolutely correct. I dont understand saturation. I always use it when I feel like I eq'd too much character out of a sound and I want to bring back some of that timbre. Like when you're trying to take out clashing frequencies in a sample. I didn't realize "distortion" was the same thing. After watching the video, I'm amazed by how much of this I already intuited from my music experience and math education. Having the exact numbers is definitely helpful but there's so much value in wrestling with an idea before seeking the answer.
With a background in engineering, including Fourier analysis and other mathy stuff, i must say that this video's ability to break down complex mathematical concepts in an intuitive way is genius.
bro you are like the 3blue1brown of music production, this is incredible. I have been looking for something just like this, that's some university level quality shit. Perfect to actually learn and improve, thank you so much!
Thank you for this! I knew just enough of the math/physics of music and waves to know some explanation like this must exist, but didn't know enough to know what it was.
i was so focused on all the content with my eyes bugging out at the screen trying to figure out all the math but the spell was finally broken at "humps in the right places" and that's when i subbed
bro, pls come back!!! I love so much all your under-the-hood videos!!!! It is such a fire content. never watched something even closer competitive. It is an empty YT niche!!!! We are waiting for you!!!
This video was awesome for math & music lovers like me. It drew me in & I couldn't stop watching. This made a lot of sense, and gives me a better idea of what I'm doing when I add saturation.
Thanks sseb. Great intro on distortion. This helps me to understand ehy saturation helps make sounds louder. I’m going to watch the rest of this series.
High school algebra teacher here - just got schooled. I’m definitely using this next year in our basic function analysis unit… and again in our sinusoidal function analysis unit.
Hey dude, great explanation with the visuals. Never really thought about quarter wave symmetry and how odd harmonics preserve it. That was helpful. Ooo and I didn’t realize that triangle harmonics have their “phase flipped”. I put that in quotes because waveforms don’t actually have individual harmonics. Harmonics as seen through a spectrum analyzer are a representation of how energy is distributed in the waveform. There aren’t additive individual cycles obviously. I think that’s something not a lot of people understand. In other words there’s no such thing as individual harmonics, but there is such a thing as energy distribution that can be understood with a FFT.
There is so little coverage of this topic (Fourier analysis?) in mainstream music production videos. Thanks for bringing this to the forefront with such simplified but well prepared explanations and diagrams.
@@sseb_music deserved to be known bro! like tf the knowledge that you have rn was INSANE! & the knowledge that you've shared to us were totally helpful!
Just WOW. Amazing videos. just watched all of them. These must take so much work, it will pay off brother believe me. One thing I would like to know: Specific EQ "tips", with examples. I know it always depends on the source, but i have found myself reducing certain areas on x instruments pretty much everytime (reduce 200-300hz on bass, making a smiley face on kicks.... etc)
I hope viewers can appreciate that this information is incredibly relevant _well_ beyond just music. Signal process is fundamental to so much of physics and engineer. Well done, sir!
Just about every piece of electronics can be described as a signal transfer function like that - it was honestly a better explanation than my lecturers
Ahead of the curve 😄
his kno kno is thick and long
When he got to Rectification, I was like: “Ah, AC to DC conversion. Electrolytics not included.”
just thought the same thing its basically analysis
Please never stop doing these videos. I fucking love them.
Just for you, I won't stop 😉
@@sseb_music ye, you did it 😞
@@sseb_music where are you now
@@sseb_music Where are you?
@@karo2090 Hollywood abducted him because he was about to expose their secrets. >.
i need more of this channel i‘m tired of tutorials being like:“iF yoU tUrn Up ThE deCay tiMe on The ReVerB, thE revErb taKeS lOngEr tO decAy“
more content is on it's way sir
I am on the path to production enlightenment and sseb is my maharishi
Yep, I thoght I know everything I heard in this video, but it was collected collected bit by bit in years. Quallity stuff
this made me laugh so hard hahah
Oh my gosh, that just gave me a Kamala flashback.
Super surprised to see such accurate mathmatical signal processing ideas in a music production video, excellent job!
This is much better than most TH-cam videos, like Paul Third's, where they dont fully understand what they're talking about and either give information that's incorrect, or information that is strangely myopic and missing a lot of relevant information.
wow, the part about quarter-wave symmetry and odd harmonics was definitely a mind-blown moment. Also perfect level of difficulty. Thanks for the university-level education!
I've literally studied calc, but I never thought to put two and two together. It makes SO MUCH sense!!
your tutorials have substance man. I watch a lot of tutorials online and this was the one first one that actually told me what exactly those fancy graphs on waveshapers are. Thanks!
@@sseb_music really looking forward to the next video.
I scroll through tutorial videos all day and find nothing usefull. Just found this dude, this channel is amazing 👏
Thank you for making a video covering this topic that does not dwell in half-truths and oversimplifications! This is easily one of the most misunderstood topics in audio engineering and most gear/plugin makers are not helping one bit
It’s very difficult to get me to comment on vids, but this is dope af.
glad you liked it enough to leave a comment 😀
Honestly though I wasn’t expecting it to actually be jam packed with awesome knowledge.... huge props
I agree
Getting comments is more important than views and likes? Head scratcher 🤔
I just missed 20 seconds reading this comment and laughing. Rewind
Man your knowledge, delivery style, humor... Everything I want from a chanel
Agree 100% - and not an annoying typical super surprised-open-mouthed "you shit in my cereal" click bate-y thumbnail in sight!
@@Sketchwald "You shit in my cereal" has me sitting here holding in a big laugh in a public place. Thank you!
I'm an electrical engineer that started doing audio stuff and I've been surprised by how much engineering stuff applies to audio. This video introduces you to the concept of Fourier Series in a waay more interesting way than a college lecture.
If you go down far enough, everything can be described with math. So, it's not that surprising that the more technical you get in any field, the more you start top see the overlaps.
I mean, mechanical engineering and marathon running at first seem to have nothing to do with one another, but if you want to develop an ideal gait to optimize speed over time, you're going to start running into all the same issues that you do when designing an optimized machine.
that play on words at 11:25 is worthy of a subscription.
I really like seeing the cross between math and music that these videos cover, keep up the strong work!
😂 thanks I missed the ... convoluted
After youtubeing for a long long time and coming across countless semi-useful and plain useless production videos, I ended up getting to know this channel, and let me say, you are by far the best one. Clear, well done, technical explanations, graphics to understand better, and especially USEFUL tips on key aspects of production. Awesome!
Love this. Been studying sound design for a year independently and this is one of the most informative videos I've ever seen. I've come back to this over and over again at varying levels of experience and find a deeper understanding each time! Bravo!
I'm still really excited for the compression video! Even though it's been 2 years I'm still faithfully subscribed and checking back!
So I randomly clicked on this video to fill some time while I was busy and couldn’t actually search for anything specific. But instead of mindlessly listening for a minute and switching to something else. I was enjoying and thought I should leave a like and finish the full video. By the end of the next minute I was fully distracted by the video, not finishing what I was doing or looking for anything else to watch. By the end of it, I had decided it would be a crime to not subscribe and leave a comment for engagement of the TH-cam algorithms.
Awesome video, you made a ton of concepts I have tried to learn and never fully understood, super intuitive and engaging. How you explained and visually showed the information was the perfect tools I needed to actually have it click in my brain. Please continue more of these. They are great.
Thanks for reading my Ted Talk about the inner workings of my adhd brain, moment to moment.
❤
dude this is finally a serious tutorial that makes me want to delve deeper. can’t wait for next video
4:59 this was really an eye-opener for me. I always imagined that less "sine-like" waves had more frequencies because more dramatic deviations from sine meant higher frequencies. This is a much more elegant way to think about it. A lot of the information you've presented in this video was stuff I had to spend a long time finding, largely because most production discourse revolves around "buy this plugin" and "use these samples." It's amazing to have all this information distilled into one source. Thank you!
Your videos bring back so much of my university memories back. I learned all this theory in the past and mathematics but it was before I started producing music. It was just another formula I needed to learn off for an exam back then. Thanks for putting so much depth into these videos they are really good for getting into the weeds of that is actually going on.
I am literally rewatching the video I watched half a year ago, because this is huge!! Especially, when having the new videos on saturation. Love you, man❤️
As a guy with a bachelors in mathematics I really appreciate your approach to teaching this material. Very different from most other things online. Right up my ally
Amazing video. I just found your channel after producing as a hobbyist for 3 years. Now that I’m getting comfortable with the basics, I’m glad to have a resource for more technical ideas that I feel ready to engage with.
man, the amount of depth in your breakdowns is amazing. i'm just starting to grasp at the technicalities of music and you've fed me so much more information in such a well put together format. thanks so much dude
Dude, where did you learn all of this stuff lol. These are some of the best videos I've ever seen. I have a hard time understanding the complicated stuff, and I'm still not sure EXACTLY what's going on, but you do an extremely good job of explaining things, and I'm learning things in your videos that I've never seen in other tutorials. Thank you
its easy you just look up the information online and then give a synopsis of it in a video.
@@pigsweat7763 but the question was where…not how…silly goose
@@lex4478 well then the answer is probably on google. not that complicated. the tricky part is to search in physics terms because its complicated to find in depth information on audio effects, but signal processing is exactly the same so no big deal
@@samylemzaoui2298 go to bed
He’s probably into math
Very refreshing to get more info than I thought I needed, typically with these type of videos you get less but I love how in depth you go
Spoken like a DSP engineer. You have my attention, sir - golden technical content!
This video was freaking awesome, thanks so much for making. Looking forward to diving into the others. Please make more!!
I have a degree in electrical engineering and I was very impressed with the mathematical accuracy you used to describe all this. Subbed, would love to see other music production techniques described in this way
Wow, I wish I had been given an explanation like this in college. This is probably the most intuitive video on the topic of saturation that I’ve seen!
Mad respect for letting the technical exist and not dumbing it down. This is my kind of video.
Best saturation video I found so far
Nerd talk is always welcome. On the subject of saturation, it might be worth mentioning the differences between simple plugins based solely on waveshaping and the physical phenomena actually taking place with tape or transformer. The nonlinearity of inductance based components is more complex and more difficult to simulate than active components like tubes or transistors.
Finally a video that goes into actual depth and knows what it's talking about. I appreciate the maths of it and theory
"It's a little... convoluted." I see what you did there! I did a fair bit of signal processing in my time, but I still learned a lot from your video. Thanks!
The discussion of math and exponential functions here was so useful. Totally shifts the way I think about square or more complex waves.
Honestly one of the best tutorials Ive ever found on this platform. Thanks for sharing
Thanks for this series. I'm subbed to many channels but this might be the first time I've ever hit the notifications bell.
This channel is going to get huge, and deservedly so.
"The best-sounding distortion comes from properly processing the sound before you even send it into your distortion" is eye-opening, as was your previous video's tip about (paraphrasing) "The more frequencies you remove from a signal, the more headroom you gain to drive the remaining signal into your saturator". You're clarifying these ideas in a way that fills in the missing links between theory and application. Psyched for the next video.
some people pay lots of money to get this but here u are giving us for free. My thanks and appreciation.
This video is great. I've been making music with guitars and synths for 50 years, always thought about this stuff but never put the time into studying it. And here you hand it to me in 17 minutes. Thank you!
A more basic discussion would probably make sense to a lot more people - even my eyes started to glaze over after 13 minutes or so.
Consider doing something similar about flanging and comb filters.
The big thing for me was at the end when you mention intermodulation distortion. Finally someone said it!
I've never heard a single person bring it up, and it's SOOOO important. Intermodulation distortion is where all the magic is.
You play a guitar note through a cranked amp and you hear a clean note. Play two notes and all these other overtones happen.
I thought I was the only one who noticed.
Thanks!
Extremely clear & rigorous breakdown. This helped me a lot! Thanks much for phenomenal work. 🙏
This is how a video is done, not just the what, but also the why. Breaking it down from the fundamentals. Way better than any other video i've seen on the subject Thank you! Keep it up! I will keep watching for sure.
I like the way how you produce your video --> no fancy cuts, the focus is on the content and everything is smooth! great!
It is amazing how you explain Furier Transform in a so practical way. Blowed my mind!!!
YOUR VIDEO DIDN'T ONCE ASK FOR LIKES OR SUBSCRIPTIONS, THANK YOU
I've wanted to make a video about this stuff for like two years but you have more information to share and better visuals than I could manage, great job.
I'd like to see a video just touching on how input volume has a major effect on distortion; you mentioned fuzz and the craziest thing about many classic guitar fuzz pedals is that lowering input volume actually reduces distortion without making the output much quieter. Granted that's more a result of how the components react to the electrical signal than waveshaping, but I think that's still a huge part of the process which people overlook.
Thank God, a video about audio stuff that actually explains things. I love being able to watch a video about music and not have to roll my eyes constantly.
This is the most comprehensive and clear video ever! Can't imagine how hard was to make all the images and animations to make ir clearer. Thank you!
this is so insanely good. my brain feels so understood.every craving for possible explanations or examples is satisfied before it can come to conciousness. 4 mins in and i learned so much that i havent learned in 13 years of dealing with music and watching production videos from time to time. i cant even express this properly right now. gonna go watch other videos on your channe afterwards.
its almost like an advanced AI sampled the way my brain understands those concepts or modelled them and then gave it to my brain that lives in the past with a 30 minute delay.
What a video! I had a major backlog of Production videos I went through, roughly 150, and your 3 videos are hands down the best in that list, it's not even a contest.
This concept in particular took me a few re-watches to really grasp, but you did such a great job laying out and depicting the core relationship between Even and Odd Harmonics, and how to maintain the Fundamental Harmonic, and what happens when you use Asymmetric Curves, it's knowledge really worth treasuring and I'm so grateful you put the likely massive effort required into describing it so well.
I'm extremely interested to see how these concepts apply to Intermodulation Distortion, in particular towards things like Distorted Guitars. Thinking about such a concept and how it relates to massive walls of Guitars makes my head spin and I'm wondering if there is actually a method to the madness of making all of that work in Harmony or Dissonance without an excess of the other.
Thank you so much for this invaluable resource! To say I'm looking forward to your next video would be a understatement.
Love the techie element - we have enough vids that gloss over the details of how and why, we need more like this.
I like how solid and clear the concepts are in your videos. These are indeed the basics anyone doing sound/music production should understand.
As an audio educator, I'm happy to finally see a well-produced video on the topic and bummed that you beat me to the punch.
My only critique is that of the label "saturation" being used as the umbrella term for all types of distortion. I do feel general "distortion" is more appropriate due to the bredth of the definition whereas "saturation" has a more specific connotation and specific use-case - it's (traditionally) just soft clipping. Either way, your content is sound and your presentation, on point, excellent, and I love it. Keep it up!
thank you! I actually thought about this quite a bit. The word 'saturation' as it originally applied to audio referred to magnetic saturation of tape which is when an increase in an applied magnetic field doesn't increase the magnetization of the tape in a proportional way, which gives rise to soft clipping. The term was then used to describe any soft clipping (tube, transformer, etc.). But nowadays I think most people use the word 'saturation' to mean any nonlinearity. While it's technically not saturation, words change over time and I think it's the most commonly used. I chose to not use distortion since linear distortions exist (i.e. phase distortion), and I didn't want to confuse people since I'm just focusing on nonlinearities in this video. Anyway thanks for the comment! 🙂
@@sseb_music I see your point. Thanks for the clarification and the thoughtful reply. It's a relief seeing videos that are a notch above the rest in the quality of actual science behind the subject. The world needs more of this, imo.
This is one of the most advanced and detailed vids I've ever seen. Absolutely phenomenal! I've subscribed. You're amazing man
DUDE.... I've been using graphic distortion and saturators for years, and had a pretty decent intuitive understanding, but I honestly learned SO MUCH from this video!! Thank you thank you thank you!!!!!! Can't wait to dive into more of your content!
I''ll have to rewatch this 5 times before I can make future suggestions. This is so transformative! Thanks!
Yo this is honestly some of the best in depth explanations of audio processing! Great videos, keep it up :)
Man... I love how detailed and deep this video is. Going into the science of how things work is awesome, and including maths gives a deeper level of understanding. I know that's not a popular opinion but maths is vital for breaking real world phenomena into easy to manage thought experiments. I am loving your channel and content, and find that in a sea of beginner oriented channels that have very little left to teach me, I am learning a hell of a lot from yours. Please keep this up .
Keep up the good quality, I am excited for more!
You not blowing up, leads me to believe many of the consumers of TH-cam music production education were stupid, and are still stupid. They just couldn't hang, no matter how much crayon and macaroni you tried to cheerily, expertly, respectfully, and concisely spell it out with. You rock man. Thanks so much for these!
Dude, you really need to just do a video on Fourier theory and get it out of the way. Give as little of the math as is necessary, but don't hold back. People will get it. It'll make it a lot easier to be talking in the frequency domain instead of in the time domain from that point on out.
PS - You're killin' it. Keep it up. I also can't wait to hear you get "convoluted*. Admit it: you've had some hardcore engineering or science training. I'm guessing BSEE or BSME, but Math or Applied Math or Physics or maybe even Chemistry are all possible, too. Theoretically, even CS, but you seem too cool for that one. Just a guess. Tell me I'm wrong. 😉
Fourier is coming! We're slowly working our way there, but have to build up more of a foundation first haha. Thank you for all the kind words on my videos! And yes, I dabble in STEM from time to time ;)
Great video. You clearly explain the mathematics while relating it to what we hear and perceive. You should make more videos that get into the weeds of signal processing like this!
5:15 'clipped' becomes 'flipped' - you are blowing my mind! I mean, I understand pretty much everything, but you are going so deep! +sub
Definitely a niche sub-topic, but I'd love a video comparing application of saturators in different routing orders. i.e. applying a saturator before vs after reverb, short delay, or a phaser
definitely! I will touch on effect chain order in the next video
@@sseb_music !!!🙌
Fun party trick: You can make a saw wave using a sine wave and a saturation function, of course. But if you apply a saturation function to a saw wave, you get back the exact saturation curve that you applied, repeated every wavelength.
Bonus trick: This means you can encode any repeating sound as a saturation curve.
I don’t understand. Are you saying you can create a saturation curve based on the tone of the sound you apply?
@@starfishandroid Yes, I am indeed saying that!
Think about it this way: A saw wave is just a straight line going from the minimum value to the maximum value over a particular span of time. If you scale value and time into the range from 0 to 1, then a saw wave is f(x) = x. It visits every possible value in the range, in order.
Which means if you apply a saturation curve to a saw wave, it visits every point on the saturation curve in order.
Which means if you use a sound waveform as the saturation curve, that means it visits every point in the sound waveform in order.
Congratulations, you have invented a weird way to do waveform synthesis!
I've actually done this in practice. The HTML5 audio functions don't have a way to specify a short repeating waveform for an oscillator to play, but they do have a sawtooth oscillator and a distortion effect that works by specifying a saturation curve.
Please make more vids. These are incredible. There are few out there, with this level of depth. You are answering all of my questions, but as I'm sure I have unanswered questions I didn't ask, I would like to see more content, please.
Having watched a video from this channel earlier, I was unsurprised by the fact that this was incredibly informative and concise whilst still containing some occasional humour. Awesome stuff.
WOW! I always wanted to discover what’s under those tool we normally use, like saturation, equalisation and compression, and finally I found someone who explain that in a deeper way than basically all the TH-cam tutorial. Thank you so much for these videos, please continue to bring these tipe of format, I’m learning A LOT. 🙏🏻 In addition, I would suggest you to make some videos where you implements those theoretical concepts in a mix, for example, because yes, now I know way more than before on what saturation does, but I wouldn’t know where applying the right type of saturation. Thank you, again, for the attention (ye it’s a pretty long message I’m sorry😅) and have a good day!
You're absolutely correct. I dont understand saturation. I always use it when I feel like I eq'd too much character out of a sound and I want to bring back some of that timbre. Like when you're trying to take out clashing frequencies in a sample. I didn't realize "distortion" was the same thing. After watching the video, I'm amazed by how much of this I already intuited from my music experience and math education. Having the exact numbers is definitely helpful but there's so much value in wrestling with an idea before seeking the answer.
please keep making more videos, i have learned more in last 5 videos than most content out there
With a background in engineering, including Fourier analysis and other mathy stuff, i must say that this video's ability to break down complex mathematical concepts in an intuitive way is genius.
bro you are like the 3blue1brown of music production, this is incredible. I have been looking for something just like this, that's some university level quality shit. Perfect to actually learn and improve, thank you so much!
wow this is the best tutorial ive seen on youtube about this topic, amazing - pls dont stop uploading
Thank you for this! I knew just enough of the math/physics of music and waves to know some explanation like this must exist, but didn't know enough to know what it was.
I'd never fully linked up square/saw/triangle waves with their harmonic series in my mind - thanks!
i was so focused on all the content with my eyes bugging out at the screen trying to figure out all the math but the spell was finally broken at "humps in the right places" and that's when i subbed
Wish I found this gold mine ages ago, but I'm glad I did now. This was awesome dude, thank you.
I finally fully understand what iZotope Trash 2 is doing now. Here, take my sub.
Been binging your channel and feel like I’m finally leveling up after a long period of production plateauing. Thank you!
This is actually the best production video I've seen in months. Learned a lot!
You have no idea how long I've been expecting videos like this.... Props man🤞🤞
bro, pls come back!!! I love so much all your under-the-hood videos!!!! It is such a fire content. never watched something even closer competitive. It is an empty YT niche!!!! We are waiting for you!!!
thank you for the lesson - i also very much appreciated you drinking the wine at 2:55 - i really felt that
Incredible explanation and quality visuals. I'll definitely be watching again.
This video was awesome for math & music lovers like me. It drew me in & I couldn't stop watching. This made a lot of sense, and gives me a better idea of what I'm doing when I add saturation.
hey man thank you. Have been trying to produce for years and this is one of the most useful guides i've ever seen.
this is raw talent, what you’re doing for the culture is unmatched
"convoluted"! I love it!!!
Thanks sseb. Great intro on distortion. This helps me to understand ehy saturation helps make sounds louder. I’m going to watch the rest of this series.
High school algebra teacher here - just got schooled. I’m definitely using this next year in our basic function analysis unit… and again in our sinusoidal function analysis unit.
Your channel cuts a gaping hole through all the noise and misinformation. Please keep the videos coming!
what an amazing video, every audio engineer needs to watch this
Hey dude, great explanation with the visuals. Never really thought about quarter wave symmetry and how odd harmonics preserve it. That was helpful.
Ooo and I didn’t realize that triangle harmonics have their “phase flipped”.
I put that in quotes because waveforms don’t actually have individual harmonics. Harmonics as seen through a spectrum analyzer are a representation of how energy is distributed in the waveform. There aren’t additive individual cycles obviously. I think that’s something not a lot of people understand. In other words there’s no such thing as individual harmonics, but there is such a thing as energy distribution that can be understood with a FFT.
There is so little coverage of this topic (Fourier analysis?) in mainstream music production videos. Thanks for bringing this to the forefront with such simplified but well prepared explanations and diagrams.
This channel will be HUGE after months & months, years h years FOR SURE!
@@sseb_music deserved to be known bro! like tf the knowledge that you have rn was INSANE! & the knowledge that you've shared to us were totally helpful!
You are basically the Aarthificial of music production. Instant sub for the in-depth explanation + clean, helpful visuals!
Just WOW. Amazing videos. just watched all of them. These must take so much work, it will pay off brother believe me.
One thing I would like to know:
Specific EQ "tips", with examples.
I know it always depends on the source, but i have found myself reducing certain areas on x instruments pretty much everytime (reduce 200-300hz on bass, making a smiley face on kicks.... etc)
This is so rad, actually providing in depth info instead of babby's first synth tutorial like 99% of YT. Excellent 👌
Probably the best video explanation of saturation on the internet
yo you don't post enough, your content is unique and people are clearly loving it, keep it up !
saturation is something I never think of using. Well done on the video.
This was fantastic thank you!