The difference between distortion, saturation and overdrive

What is a production without some warmth? Especially in today's digital environment, it is extremely effective to fake an analog and classic warmth in your songs. There are many competent plug-ins that simulate this warmth, but then it can be good to first know what the difference is between Distortion, Saturation and Overdrive. Below you can read about the differences in sound and also get some tips on plug-ins that create this.

Distortion

Translates to "distortion". This makes sense, as distortion usually creates a more violent/sharp character of a sound between these three types of effects. Distortion is commonly abbreviated as "Dist" and is the most common effect to use on electric guitars in rock and metal music. Dist creates an incredible amount of harmonics, as it raises all waveforms and frequencies and then abruptly cuts them off. A so-called "fuzz dist" creates so much harmonics that it almost starts to resemble a white noise. Distortion is an incredibly useful effect if you want to drastically change a sound, or just want to create some chaos in your sound.

There are a lot of dist-plugins in logic's guitar-amps, otherwise you can use logic's built-in dist-plugin or with pleasure play around in Guitar Rig by Native Instruments.

Overdrive

When you overdrive a signal (hence the name) it will sound more and more "cracked" and previously unnoticed harmonics will emerge from the soundstage. You can simply say that overdrive is between Dist and Saturation. If you pull a signal far enough, it eventually becomes so distorted that you call it Distad. This effect is usually applied to guitars and synthesizers, but you can of course try to overdrive any sound. Overdrive is also available as its own logic plugin and in the program's virtual guitar pedals. (Guitar Rig also has some fat Overdrives in its Amps)

Saturation

Saturation is a way of mimicking the effect of sending sound in and out and in and out through various components and processors, through cables, mixers, etc. It can also refer to the effect that tape recorders had on recorded sound. All of this colored the sound, made the sound less clear, but at the same time automatically sanded away the unwanted harsh details of the sound. It also compressed the sound slightly. But most importantly, it caused harmonics and noise, etc. to form a bolster around the original sound, making the original sound slightly thicker and fatter and a bit more "lush". An extremely good plugin is Fabfilter's "Saturn". With it you can create a variety of saturations. You can also get dist and overdrive in Saturn.