Using Distortion to Make Things Pop

Distortion can be a powerful tool for a guitarist, and is often the main thing you would think about with most guitar players. Often metal music is so overladen with distortion that it's hard to distinguish between seperate instruments. But what about pop or hiphop?

Often times distortion is used to keep interest going with the listener. After listening to something repetitive for more than a couple minutes, distortion can be used to give the same thing you've just heard a little twist. This is a popular technique in Pop music, by distorting the drums for example in Shawn Mendez Treat You Better the song can be drawn out and interest of the short attention spanned teenager is kept. But distortion can be used in other ways with drums. And something that can really make sampled drums stand out is adding a little distortion (used sparingly) to the drum mix. If you're going for a drum sound that needs to pierce through the other elements of your song and your drum samples just don't do the job, you could layer some drum samples together or you could add distortion. After mixing or potentially grouping my drums to the desired levels, I sent them to a distortion. I've used a clip distortion plugin but different effects can be achieved from different types of distortion

In this instance I've run the distortion in parallel, then mixed in the desired amount. This gives me more control over how much distortion is added since I don't want the entire drum kit heavily distorted. What does this do to the sound of the drums?

The drums have now gained harmonics in the mid - high end and will have a greater punch in the song. As seen below there is also an increase in volume, by adding this distortion it's added volume to the drums. This can be a used as a method of crescendoing a piece of music without touching the volume fader.

References: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDTfYxaBy4w