I was reading about Thomas Dolby’s forthcoming memoir The Speed of Sound. In which the question “when and why did you decide to write a memoir?” was asked. Which Thomas replied as follows:

Over the years I used to keep a diary on and off, and at various different times I had a Filofax, a Palm Pilot, an Apple Newton, a Blackberry; something I’d just keep notes on.

It suddenly hit me: this is the main reason why I am blogging since the year 2000! For keeping my memories alive. For not forgetting the things which are so easily to be forgotten.

Today I was working on some sounds in Reason. As most of my readers are aware of, I am rather obsessed by saturation. Today I analysed Synchronous and The Echo. I love The Echo OVDR setting. In a lot of cases I prefer it over the TUBE setting. And it sounds a whole lot different from to the Pulveriser overdrive.

Today I discovered that The Echo OVDR sounds 99% identical as the Synchronous Dist 1 (zie update 2). But Synchronous Dist 1 has a wider saturation range than The Echo which can be super handy.

So there you go dear diary, Synchronous Dist 1 has a lovely saturation tone I should use more often. And maybe you, my dear reader, should do the same!

Update 1: someone asked me about the method I use for spotting something like this. I simply run a perfect sine wave from Thor into both devices and A/B compare them using Ableton Live’s Spectrum device in Rewire mode. The Reason build-in spectrum analyser is in my opinion not useful at all (it can’t zoom and the dynamic range is way too small) but Ableton Spectrum is just fantastic (it even can show the note names of peak frequencies which is like SUPER useful).

Update 2: Set The Echo Drive at 83 and compare this to Synchronous Dist 1 with Amount at 100% and Dist Character at 59%, both devices sound almost identical this way.