Distortion Texture and Tape Loops-Moneõ Piotr Majer-Sound Design Approach

Hi, my name is Piotr Majer.

I make music under the alias of Moneõ.

I'm also a part of a duo called VXRIABLE.

I'm a sound engineer, a composer.

I also make sounds and music for video games.

My personal alias, which is Moneõ, is an exploration of pushing the sound to its limits, whilst also keeping the organicness of the sound. And then further on, exploring a genre which can be called a crossover between future beats, ambient music, and electronica as a whole sub-genre.

So I use distortion as a tool to add physicality to the sound. The best analogy for this is that I treat the speaker as my instrument, because I deal a lot with synthetic sources and sources that originated pretty much from the code, from the programs. And I get to achieve a sort of physicality of the sound, which is adding the texture to it, which is pushing the speaker to its limit.

So how distortion can be explained is you have a sound and you're pushing this sound beyond what a medium can reproduce. And that's adding additional harmonics, which is from, let's say, the bass. Maybe you're adding more high frequencies because the waveform is changing.

Another part of my distortion exploration is the use of tape loops. For example, the cassette tape loops that I used on one of the tracks, which is called “I Know You Will Read This.” I used a tape loop that I recorded and recontextualized with the beat that was programmed in my DAW.

The sounds that are distorted sound more aggressive, sound a bit more out of control in a way, but they can be fitted with elements that are a bit more controlled and that’s creating a sort of contrast.

I use distortion to add the physicality to the sound — to get out of the digital domain, which is kind of restrictive and makes everything sound quite similar because we’re confined by certain aspects of music production these days.

Since analog equipment is fairly expensive, this is a way of exploring that side of music that’s most of the time not approachable for newcomers. And I was trying to find a way of exploring this side of things without the equipment, which is possible with plugins, with various software, with even inexpensive equipment that’s pushed to its limit.

The intro track to my EP features a sound that is very mild, but it’s on the verge of breaking up together with the bass sound that sounds huge. That was a simple bass sound that I fed into an old mixer that was clipping, and that created this overwhelming texture that was necessary for that track.

Distortion can also be a tool to make certain things more audible on different sound systems, on the phone for example. We spend a lot of time creating something on very expensive speakers, and what distortion or saturation allows us to do is make those things translate a bit better on devices that are available to the public, like phones.

A lot of people listen to music on their phones, and they simply cannot hear because of the physics — they can’t hear the big sub-bass or the big low-end that we spend hours crafting. So that’s where a lot of sound engineers reach out for distortion to make those sounds translate a bit better — to kind of trick the mind that the sound is there without even hearing it, because the distortion is creating the harmonics.

To someone who’s a beginner, I would say try and explore, try and push the tools, try and research the tools, learn those tools, and then just use them in a whole other way that you haven’t thought about, that the manual didn’t cover, that nobody before used them in. Feed a very loud sound to a device that says in the manual, “don’t feed loud sounds into it” — although within reason.

Just try and explore, just try and experiment, just use the tools that you have available and play with them.