thanks, your expert advice is appreciated, so this is also how you would treat distorted/saturated 808's? i never seem to get it to work, it always end up sounding dull or 'behind the curtains'. also when using a filter on your 808 do you touch the resonance also or is this matter of taste?

 

You can add a lowpass before AND after the distortion. They all work together. Distortion adds harmonics (to the harmonic-free sine), so you might want to tame those.
But with a lowpass after the synth will mean that the distortion will have lower volume of the sine coming in, and will not distort it as much. It's a balance of things. It's up to taste and preference.

I generally don't use filter resonance when treating sine waves. Perhaps I play around with resonance on a key-tracked filter that is after the distortion (to enhance certain sonic qualities/harmonics).

There's also another way to control/attenuate the amplitude/volume on higher notes in your synth. You can assign key-tracking to volume/amplitude, if you have that option. The result will be that the higher you go in pitch, the lower the volume will be (linearly). Or vice-versa, depending on how you set it up.

You can also side-chain compress the distorted signal, and put a highpassed version of your pure sine on the sidechain/key input. That way the compressor will react only to the higher pitches. This allows you to also control the compressor's envelope.

It's all different ways and different results. It's up to you to say which one you like and want to use.

 

Last edited: Nov 25, 2016

gonna try all of your suggestions, some of them sound really simple and obvious in retrospect. i've sent you a personal message btw. thanks!