Distortion and Brute Factor don't change sound much

[unitoforce]

I'm not sure if this is a technical issue with my polybrute or just how the distortion is meant to work on the polybrute, but when I crank up the disto or brute factor knobs, it barely changes the sound. It thickens it up a bit, but doesn't result in the wild distortion, overdrive, and wave-folding that I see in videos of the minibrute.  I found a YouTube video of someone also demonstrating the brute factor settings on their polybrute and it similarly made very little difference to the sound.

(Otherwise, I love, love what you can do with this synth, and it's acoustic, expressive, morphing sound. It's gorgeous. I just was hoping to get a bit more grit out of it sometimes.)

[DrJustice]

First of all - welcome to the forum! 

There's nothing wrong with your PB. The Brute Factor and Disto are subtle in the PB compared to the other Brutes. I reckon it's voiced for polyphonic playing - so no crazy feedback chaos or wild distortion, but instead a softer effect for some warming up or a little grit that works well when playing chords.

[Alan Dicker]

Try brute factor with resonance dialed in.  It's a filter feedback type of distortion and so resonance has a big effect here

[unitoforce]

Thanks for this helpful feedback!  (No pun intended initially, but then when I thought about how the Brute Factor results in a sort of feedback, I was definitely not going to type something different.)

It's good to know that my synth isn't misbehaving. I am able to get some wild sounds when pushing the resonance and Brute Factor and also sweeping the slope and cutoff with the resonance and Brute Factor turned up. I do wish that they had a more traditional overdrive/distortion parameter on the filters, but I get that you can't have it all, and the PolyBrute already does many amazing things.

Thanks again!

[rrr123]

I notice that the Brute Factor is pretty subtle when the filter is in in low pass mode. With no resonance it does very little, and even if you turn up the resonance in low-pass mode the Brute Factor tends to muffle the sound a bit. However, if you turn up the resonance and also detune VCO2 against VCO1, it becomes more interesting. Once you move away from low pass to high pass or band pass, however, the Brute Factor really becomes dramatic (more like what I remember from other Arturia synths I've heard) and can scream.

And yes, the absence of a distortion/overdrive effect near the output is a bit strange on this synth that has so many other features. I'd love to be able to add a bit of roughness just before the other effects.

[SvenDia]

try experimenting with filter routing, mix and filter levels, in addition to distortion and brute factor. Routing the vcos to both filters in serial mode with levels maxed out is gonna give you a lot of dirt. Do this with triangle waves and the sub and the result is pretty clear. It’s a little counterintuitive, because the manual, IIRC, suggests that the filter routing selection is for parallel mode, but there is a distinct difference between selecting routing to the ladder only vs ladder + SP. would love someone from arturia to explain what’s going on