Notes

I'm Jonnay, welcome to season 2!
Wow does the topic look mathy
It's not that hard, and pretty fascinating actually
Intro song
You've probably heard about how tubes make music sound good. Audiophiles go nuts over tube amps.
vacuum tubes, the start of the electronic age
is the only word with double u's in english
Mixing engineers have their own outboard gear they love that have tubes
But why? and why is this important? Thats what we're looking at today
Question Marks
These things are part of the "magic of analog" and what makes analog sound "so good".
(hipster - sunglasses - even my pants are vinyl)
what happens is they add "harmonic" imperfections. I'm going to show you the magic behind that
the key to all of this is something called a "transfer function"
(title… underline fun)
So lets start with something simple like a sine wave
sine
And it gets converted to numbers.
A transfer function is a graph like this.
The x axis is the amplitude (or value) of the sine wave
the y axis is the output amplitude
yea… a bit mathey.
Anyway, if we have a line like this, we have hte "identity function"
f(x) = x
Any input is exactly the same output.
draw same bunny in, same bunny out - show dotted lines
What happens when we choose a different line, how about this?
- Brutal almost vertical line
YEOWCH
show how sine wave turns into square
See how the waveform there is completely distorted?
So this is where I talk about transistors, and Tubes again.
due to the physics of these devices, especially the tubes, what goes in doesn't come out the same on the way out
all kinds of factors, including things like materials used in the transistor or tube, which production run it is in, and how long the device has been powered even will affect the transfer curve
sounds familiar, then you'll remember me saying the same thing about the TB-303 and it's components.
If you have a saturator plugin for your DAW, these things do exactly what i am talking about, and now you know how!
Tips for single guys, from Justine