Make it more dirty?

Hello musicians, I have a question that I would love if someone could answer.

I am wondering if you guys have any good tips how to make my sounds more dirty/gritty/old school/vintage? Im working with syntheizers and drummachines and I'm wondering if there is and box or something I could process through to get a more dirty sound, instead of like sampling everything with a 12-bit sampler. which can be kind off tricky.

Do you know and effect box or something (whatever, just come up your suggestions) that will do this in a great way?

Give me your best suggestions and I will look em all up!

Thanks in advance

Try an Alesis BITRMAN for bit reduction and grungyness.

I wouldn't call it old school or vintage. You probably want tube distortion for that.

Vox Brit Boost tube overdrive is quite nice, warm and quite a 'soft' overdrive, soft being quite relative in this context.

or you could buy anything from Alesis or Kurzweil

That was pretty funny.

for high end noize there's the evol fucifier (no really). it has many textures and whatnot that are subtle to extreme including saturation, germanium pres, filters, eq inductors, output transformer overdrive, etc. only drawbacks is its mono (and fcuking expensive!)

http://evolaudio.com/fucifier/index.html

Dirty/gritty: distortion. Maybe also try a bit crusher plugin.

I would think old school/vintage would be more noisy than dirty.

Regarding the suggestions on tube distortion: does anyone find that useable? I've tried running a synth into an Ibanez Tube King guitar pedal and just couldn't come up with a good sound. I get much better results using distortion plugins. I'm not sure if tube distortion just doesn't work that well with synths, or if it's just that pedal.

Buy an old cheap mixer and use to it to color the sound. Or get some guitar pedals and run the sound through them. Or buy a Mutator...

Record onto tape, any tape.

Attenuate your highs and lows, mid heavy audio sounds very old school.

Howzabout a WMD geiger counter into an analog filter of some sort?

I have an electro-harmonix Tube Zipper, it's tube distortion into a vactrol envelope-controlled analog filter, it makes things sound duuurty.

+1 to the idea of recording on to tape. A three head cassette deck is one possibility - these let you monitor the recorded sound in real time, with a slight delay. You can experiment with overdriving or even distorting the tape.

I was also going to recommend that. I have one and it's kind of a dual overdrive (with the tubes) and distortion (EH-Muff type). It doesn't work on everything and extreme settings have a sloppy sound (kind of like as if it had a slow envelope setting to it at all times) but there's so many sounds in this thing, you'll never outgrow it...

Plus it's cheap, what's not to like.