early aphex twin distortion sound

[colmon]

you know, the distortion that's all over "ventolin", his nine inch nails remixes etc etc

is it something to do with processing an external signal through the korg ms20?

[colmon]

for reference

[Joey]

use a waveshaper.

[colmon]

yes i used to mess around with the waveshaper in fruity loops back in the day

any ideas how this effect was achieved in the early 1990s? i definitely read something somewhere about aphex twin routing signals through his ms20 via inputs that weren't meant for processing. i've also heard this sound on some coil stuff. it's really thick and resonant, but somehow never clips into full on fuzzy distortion

[tallowwaters]

I thought that guy made most all of his gear back in the day. I remember reading that he even made his own sampler...

[aredj]

He did make/modify some stuff... but he does own some classics...

[balma]

I think sounds like comes more from experimentation, free thinking and creativity than searching for an specific gear and specific sounds.
There are so many ways to obtain distortions or these muddy sounds, they do not belong to specific instruments. Weird stuff can come out applying interaction between several synths, distortion pedals and samplers.
Sp808ex has a nice variety of distortion effects similar to those on the videos. Very similar results can be obtained from sampling drums and adding distortion to the samples


And as far as a know, the modification of synths by Aphex Twin is an urban legend.

[Sir Ruff]

The main whining sound on ventolin is from feedback on his mixer i.e. he overgained the input or send with the same input signal.

[nvbrkr]

Turbosynth?

[colmon]

yeah i know aphex twin may have done some mods back in the day and maybe during his dsp period, but his early stuff is mostly off the shelf gear -- sequential circuits studio 440, various roland drum machines, oberheim matrix 1000, and some kind of rompler, often processed through the ms20

bearing in mind i don't actually want to achieve this sound myself, just intrigued as to whether anyone with an ms20 has ever happened upon a similar sound themselves

[Scories]

With creative gear abuse, it's hard to identify the specific material used.

[Sir Ruff]

The main whining sound on ventolin is from feedback on his mixer i.e. he overgained the input or send with the same input signal.

erm, just so it's clear (amidst all the speculation): this IS how he made the ventolin sound... It's not hard to do with any basic mixer.

regarding his use of the MS20, here is another one off the same album where he fed a drum track into the filter CV (maybe this is the sound your thinking of?):



I think there is some truth to his modding of gear, but really, it's not magic. Most of Ambient Works I is a matrix1000, creative sampling and a s**t ton of reverb (what sampler he used isn't clear tho-that seems a little more up in the air, but it probably wasn't "homebuilt" as I've read in some places)

[pricklyrobot]

The main whining sound on ventolin is from feedback on his mixer i.e. he overgained the input or send with the same input signal.

erm, just so it's clear (amidst all the speculation): this IS how he made the ventolin sound... It's not hard to do with any basic mixer.

Sure, or pretty much anything electrical that's capable of feeding back.

Why would you want to though? Used just a bit here and there throughout the track (which is otherwise decent) it might have had a nice jarring effect, but used as unsparingly a he's done, it just goes from jarring to grating. That monotonous squeal always has me reaching for the skip button.

[Joey]

some people may like it...

i personally cant stand that song because that frequency annoys the s**t out of me, but I do like a good feedbacking here and there...

[pricklyrobot]

I do like a good feedbacking here and there...

Yeah, me too, but here and there is the key; one droning high-pitched frequency through the whole song kind of just sounds like a mistake.

Then again, the OP did ask about distortion, not feedback, so maybe no-one's out to reproduce that test-tone sound after all.