Could you post scope screenshots of "beautiful" distortions for me?

[KarenColumbo]

As much as I don't want to be obnoxious, as much I'd love to try to gain access to the mysteries of distortion/overdrive by looking at screen captured waveforms of nice, even beautiful sounding distortions and tinkering away at home to reach similar patterns on my picoscope.

So if any of you can spare a few any time and post screenshots here, it'd be extremely appreciated. Maybe I get this electronics thing into my head by way of graphic and "artistic" approach?

Would be cool if the shots included the original (input) signal also so I can see how the respective circuit changes that

TIA very much - no stress, peace & love.

An example of a "strange" waveform is in one of my other threads about an erratic distortion thing I built. This is what I try to avoid

[samhay]

Your missing something.
The art of distortion involves having different beautiful waveforms at different frequencies.

[KarenColumbo]

Yeah, but different frequencies are shown in the waveform, if somewhat encrypted

[R.G.]

Extra points to you for deciding to educate yourself about what waveforms sound like what.

This works out pretty well for gross comparisons - little spiky things sound ... sharp, and sharp corners on waveforms mean there's a lot of treble coming out. Even more, if you can do things that round off those sharp edges, you can be sure that you're getting less trebly stuff, and correspondingly, less of the big, rolling, underpinnings of the waveform will be less bass.

But it gets really difficult to do with waveforms that are not really based on repetitive underlying waves, like sines or rectangles, or combinations of these. The human eye doesn't seem to have all that much of the frequency-analyzing ability that the ear does, at least from shapes.

There's another issue with eyeballing beautiful waveforms. The speakers and to a lesser extent the amplifier after the wave shaping can do amazing amounts of filtering on the wave, to the point that horrible sounds get beautified. Rod Elliot recounts a story on his audio site about being called into help with ugly sounding guitar speakers. He fixed this by razor-blading out the aluminum dome over the voice coil.

So good on you for doing this bit of learning, and do all you can. But also learn the limits of the techniques as you go.

[karbomusic]

Awhile back I took a sine wave and ran it through various pedals, amps, and amp sims. The shocking realization was many of the waveforms (per category) were basically identical UNTIL they went through a speaker or speaker emulation. Conversely... If you have a design of your own that you build, you can very quickly determine consistently 'good sounding' by A) being consistent in your testing and B) having a known 'sounds good' trace to compare it to. IOW, for one pedal I build, if the waveform, under consistent conditions varies from the original control, it has some problem somewhere which affects how the pedal sounds. I reduced it to making sure the circuit is doing what the circuit is supposed to do with my ears being the final judge.

But to the original question, what I just described is about as close as you can get, everything else is mostly irrelevant. I also did similar to the above with my fuzz circuits, when I had the bias et al where I had previously deemed good for me, I'd always recreate it when I built another and confirm the waveform agreed - the ears typically agreed with my results, not as in sounds good/bad but as in sounds like the previous one.

[merlinb]

Kinda related

[R.G.]

Yep, they are kinda related. I didn't have a scope that would take pictures at the time, but that kind of approach was what I used in generating "Distortion 101 - a Musical Distortion Primer" starting back in 1993.   http://www.geofex.com/effxfaq/distn101.htm

It wasn't new then of course - serious musical researchers had been doing similar things for a long time.

Since you have the scope and camera out, it would be instructive for the beginners here to generate a similar set of waveforms for fundamental plus 1,2,5,10% distortion of the second, third, fifth and seventh harmonics, and if you still have the stamina, some cross mixtures.

I think I saw a phone app that will do something similar.

I'd go do t at the bench but I can't currently get to the bench owing to some medical issues.