Is this cello distorted?
So I've been listening to 2CELLOS and their cover of AC/DCs 'Thunderstruck'. Several times during the song they play with an unusual timbre. Bringing out some of the high frequencies and mechanical sounds you wouldn't usually hear from the cello in recorded music.
Here's an example, the melodic lines from this point:
I can't work out if this is an electronic distortion effect, a recording trick, or whether a cello could make this same kind of sound acoustically.
Are we hearing a (fairly subtle) distortion effect here? Or is this sound being produced another way?
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To answer the question directly, yes: I do think there is some form of distortion used. My guess would be that they recorded the cellos with contact pickups as well as microphones, and the final mix is a blend of the more naturally acoustic mic'd tone and the rawer contact pickup tone. The contact pickup will pick up a lot more stray knocks, taps and upper harmonic content.
For the section that OP highlights in the video, it sounds like there is a sub-octave mixed in to the lead line (copying the original vocal line). In some sections it sounds like overt distortion, with a corresponding bass reduction, whereas in other sections it sounds more like heavy compression or limiting verging on 'brickwalling', with clipping in the signal. My guess is that a lot of production techniques went into producing this track!
As an aside I wince slightly seeing the state of those cello bows by the end of the video.
While it's not a standard distortion, there is definitely an effect there in the recording process.
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