Slap!

A punk song about role models today

In this one case I’m going to disagree with you. I think you might be getting that impression from the vocals which are smashed the crud out of going through Reason’s scream distortion unit which is just nasty clipping Monkey_Man (and pushed really high in the mix along with their delay) as the only compressor in this track is a leveler on the bass guitar (I did try one on the master bus but didn’t like the result). There’s a lot of fuzz though too, the middle guitar has the Octavia fuzz effect and the bass is using the sabotage profile so is offers no respite from gain.

The gain staging on the master bus is all green with no smashing anywhere as you can see from the waveform Master bus is UAD Ocean way (I had to cull some bass going into it because it creates quite a smeary mess otherwise). That goes into the Arturia tape sim which normally is a strong effect but here is a dialed back version of its “analog warmth” preset to just subtly add a little warble. Then that goes into the UAD 700 tape sim, adjusted so the input gain is low and the needle just peaks in red now and then but it’s output is high.

Thanks Franjoe30 !

Yeah Monkey_Man its just very loud overall and there’s just so much distortion, I think what’s happening is multiple things, during the chorus because those vocals are so high in the mix and so saturated and it’s such a primitive straight up digital clipping complete with aliasing saturation that it’s like adding every frequency to the sound like white noise and logically as you approach 50% mix (this isn’t that high, but it is quite high) any other waveform will simply lose its coherence completely and not be able to be accurately reconstructed by the sinc reconstruction filter on the other side. You definitely hear it’s the treble end that goes first. The next thing I think is simple limiting, the final UAD tape has a hot output it peaks at just over 0/-12dB on Reason’s master output during the chorus sections, that gives the impression there’s still 12dB of headroom but it!s possible that anything over that actually gets limited in some way during export and the speed off the transients was too much for the meter to accurately display resulting in a more smashed sound. Finally I think the ocean way plugin can do some very odd things to the sound, it’s a pretty good simulation of a room and like I said I had to cut the bass guitar going in because it tried to swamp everything else out like a boomy old speaker, I think some of that is also happening when the vocals kick in but I didn’t take the same steps with them.

Thanks deadman42 ! Who’s Will?

Never heard of him

Thanks hafi19 ! So that’s all of it?

Thanks deangersmith I do have some grindcore in there a ways back, I should give it another go at some point, though I don’t feel I can do the required Cookie Monster vocals.