Pleasing Distortion

[skimpi]

well if you are saying you like the kahn example, well he is probably just distorting a 909/808 kick drum or some sort of sine wave, so he is distorting something with no harmonics. You are talking about midrange bass though, so if you already have a slightly grating bass sound with harmonics, and then distort it to add more, then that may be overkill.

but yeah if you distort on a send, then you can send however much you want to the distortion and then EQ the harshness out of it without affecting the original sound

oh ok so the mids in the example are a result of the overdrive, rather then simply being accentuated by it?

well, maybe, or like someone else said, could just be some squarewaves with not that much distortion on at all

[Artie_Fufkin]

Saturate. Bounce. Saturate. Bounce. Saturate. Bounce. Saturate. Bounce. Repeat until it sounds bad and then stop there.
imo, soft clipping works better than hard clipping to make things not sound harsh. And mix that about half and half with the original/dry signal. If your plugin doesn't have that option, you can do a parallel send track like people typically do for reverbs, compression,etc.
Sometimes though, it's easier to just blend in an extra oscillator with more harmonics or up an octave or two.

[hifi]

split freqs, distort hi

[test_recordings]

I forgot to say that I also don't really use distortion and try play with the waveforms instead, way more dynamic that way.

If you want something like distortion that doesn't compress, use a ringmodulator; you can get very complex harmonic spectrums that can be tuned quite finely.

[Dahneboy]

if you are using massive you really dont need any other distortion outside of it, massive has it all, and then just split your frequencies and compress your mids with camelphat. really easy once you get to know how massive works