VCC, VTM, Blah, Blah, Blah...What The Hell Is Wrong With Me?

[Ichad.c]

Totally agree with everything Funkybot's Evil Twin said. The most 60s drums I ever heard was when me and a friend was helping a random drummer set-up a room to record some stuff(for practicing reasons). Only used 3 mics, mono omni overhead hanging literally behind the drummers head, Shure 55S between the kick and snare, non-name el-cheapo cardioid pointing at toms about a meter away and from the back. There was nothing else special about the set-up, no fancy preamps - straight into Pro-Tools.

P.S. If you can't get other musicians together, at least try and record everything live, even is that means bashing keys/pads on a midi controller.

[camsr]

Most of the charm of "tape" IMO comes from the diminished treble power. I must be getting old to enjoy hicut filters. The saturation should make up for some of that cut by distorting it and adding that density that's associated with tape.

Also important is tape's effect on transients, which obviously had a huge effect on drums on those old recordings

That aspect of the sound can be achieved with the modern basics too, maybe not in exactly the same but convincingly enough IMO. The real magic happens in the treble, and I don't hear too many plugins that capture it easily. Or maybe it's just youtube crushing the life out of anything good in the treble range. I hate to be that guy but MP3s are rubbish (most of the time) and if you want the tape experience, you should never listen to it via lossy formats.

[BRBWaffles]

What the hell is wrong with me? Am I THAT deaf? I mean I can hear the difference between recordings when one is really clean and digital and one is noisy and dirty and obviously analog. So why is it when he enables all these plugins that are supposed to turn this mix from a clean, sterile whatever into a fat, warm, vibrant, big, whatever, I hear almost nothing?

The audio production and audiophile communities at large generally have an inexhaustible hardon for subtlety, to the point of bordering on a sort of psychosis. The number of tutorial videos on YouTube showcasing this pathology is staggering. You'll see some hotshot producer A/Bing the bypass on a DSP, and despite virtually nothing happening, will claim it's night and day. 15,000 upvotes, and 34 downvotes. It's like a sort of mass hallucination, like when you see a televangelist slapping people on the forehead to cure their AIDS, and the entire auditorium starts clapping.

My favourite example of this sort of hallucination was when a KVR user claimed to be able to hear "sample blurring" between mixes rendered at 24-bit fixed point versus 64-fit floating point. He was claiming that 64-bit FP mixes had something he called "sample blurring". He claimed so adamantly that the phenomenon was real and truly audible that a few other users decided to null-test files that he himself provided. The conclusion was that there was no different whatsoever between the files. Instead of considering the notion that he may have been possessed by some sort of acute psychotic episode, he doubled down and claimed that null-tests were an inadequate way to elucidate the effects of "sample blurring".

[wagtunes]

@kvaca

Normally, I'd be happy to post stuff here but because of past experience with certain people here, I will have to respectfully decline. The less bashing I open myself up to, the better.

It will be on Soundcloud and if you want to hear it, I'll PM you and send you the link to both versions.

But it's not going out to the KVR public.

[JoeCat]

Funkybot's post should be sticky somewhere. That's right on.

We're recording some drums in the studio and I was thinking about the mic setup - using 5 here, but even then, there's a temptation to do things a certain way because you can, and I think with the drums it comes down to the separation. We're combining certain modern production and recording techniques (isolated kick enhanced with some drum replacement to keep the low end stable and solid throughout, for example) with a desire to recreate "that" sound with plugins such as buss and tape emu, etc., after the fact. Those things don't jive.

Recording to tape with 3 mics and no ProTools, kick and snare pretty much gonna sound like you recorded them, so you put a lot of effort into getting that just right, but no separation, enhancement in post. (Not to mention get Hal Blaine for your drummer, so instead of fancy bullshit you get nothing but a remarkably solid track).

Then maybe you pan the whole shebang hard right! Who does that now and says "drums good, lets move on"?

At any rate, just to add one more thought: I've read that a lot of producers introduce some noise so that after compression, etc, there's always a floor so to speak. Makes things sound a little livelier than the completely quiet, hiss-free days of late 80s Sting. I noticed another thing: dudes were not quiet in the studio, and shit if that doesn't add a ton to the aura of a track. Listening to this the other day (which, if I'm ever in a coma, play to wake me up):



Besides the hiss, there're all kinds of noises going on. The whole thing's just noisy - sounds alive. Some jangly stuff right in the beginning. Then clearly (with cans or monitors) around the one minute mark you can here the band whooping (there's one loud "whoo" at around 1:22).

All the shit we've been trying to fix was in the recording. I think good saturation plugs, compression techniques, vintage verbs, etc. can help, but you need a commitment to royally mucking up modern production techniques to get "that" sound. As funkybot basically said, you gotta pull an Abbey Road.

[wagtunes]

Funkybot's post should be sticky somewhere. That's right on.

We're recording some drums in the studio and I was thinking about the mic setup - using 5 here, but even then, there's a temptation to do things a certain way because you can, and I think with the drums it comes down to the separation. We're combining certain modern production and recording techniques (isolated kick enhanced with some drum replacement to keep the low end stable and solid throughout, for example) with a desire to recreate "that" sound with plugins such as buss and tape emu, etc., after the fact. Those things don't jive.

Recording to tape with 3 mics and no ProTools, kick and snare pretty much gonna sound like you recorded them, so you put a lot of effort into getting that just right, but no separation, enhancement in post. (Not to mention get Hal Blaine for your drummer, so instead of fancy bullshit you get nothing but a remarkably solid track).

Then maybe you pan the whole shebang hard right! Who does that now and says "drums good, lets move on"?

At any rate, just to add one more thought: I've read that a lot of producers introduce some noise so that after compression, etc, there's always a floor so to speak. Makes things sound a little livelier than the completely quiet, hiss-free days of late 80s Sting. I noticed another thing: dudes were not quiet in the studio, and shit if that doesn't add a ton to the aura of a track. Listening to this the other day (which, if I'm ever in a coma, play to wake me up):



Besides the hiss, there're all kinds of noises going on. The whole thing's just noisy - sounds alive. Some jangly stuff right in the beginning. Then clearly (with cans or monitors) around the one minute mark you can here the band whooping (there's one loud "whoo" at around 1:22).

All the shit we've been trying to fix was in the recording. I think good saturation plugs, compression techniques, vintage verbs, etc. can help, but you need a commitment to royally mucking up modern production techniques to get "that" sound. As funkybot basically said, you gotta pull an Abbey Road.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Except trust me, when they played this on AM radio in 71, it didn't sound this clean. I'm sure this is a digital print to CD uploaded to Youtube. The CDs were much cleaner than the 45s that I bought back then. Still, this is what I'm after. Just maybe a little dirtier if at all possible.

[thecontrolcentre]

A couple of SKNote's plugins might get you thereabouts ...

Roundtone
http://www.sknoteaudio.com/wp/index.php ... and-delay/

Cuttertone
http://www.sknoteaudio.com/wp/index.php ... xing-tool/

Roundtone is a tape machine emulation. Cuttertone is a vinyl cutting pre-processor / mastering effect / mixing tool. Only $48 for the pair.

[JoeCat]

Funkybot's post should be sticky somewhere. That's right on...

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Except trust me, when they played this on AM radio in 71, it didn't sound this clean. I'm sure this is a digital print to CD uploaded to Youtube. The CDs were much cleaner than the 45s that I bought back then. Still, this is what I'm after. Just maybe a little dirtier if at all possible.

Lol we were both listening to AM in 71 (and right up the street from each other if I'm not mistaken). I had Sticky Fingers on cassette.

(pretty sure I was playing it on one of these):


But - on good vinyl with a good system (especially cartridge), this would have sounded almost as awesome. To my ears, most tech in the 70s just didn't reproduce the highs well. I'm thinking speaker tech lagged the most (I just seemed to remember it that way, but who knows). in any case, that track is ear heaven for me, and I'm more of a casual Stones fan (that's a minority I think - they are love-hate for most people I know)

[JoeCat]

Funkybot's post should be sticky somewhere. That's right on...

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Except trust me, when they played this on AM radio in 71, it didn't sound this clean. I'm sure this is a digital print to CD uploaded to Youtube. The CDs were much cleaner than the 45s that I bought back then. Still, this is what I'm after. Just maybe a little dirtier if at all possible.

I wonder too: Did 45 reproduce as well as 33 1/3" I'm thinking not (we also tended to play them on our portables till we all heard Dark Side and spent our Christmas $ on some real gear )

[wagtunes]

Funkybot's post should be sticky somewhere. That's right on...

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Except trust me, when they played this on AM radio in 71, it didn't sound this clean. I'm sure this is a digital print to CD uploaded to Youtube. The CDs were much cleaner than the 45s that I bought back then. Still, this is what I'm after. Just maybe a little dirtier if at all possible.

I wonder too: Did 45 reproduce as well as 33 1/3" I'm thinking not (we also tended to play them on our portables till we all heard Dark Side and spent our Christmas $ on some real gear )

No, 45s sounded like crap but mostly because the record players of the era didn't reproduce sound very well. Everything was treble, hiss and noise. And I loved it. When I heard my first CD I was like "WTF is this?" It took me a while to warm up to the "perfect" sound but it's still not my favorite. I prefer the dirtier sound of analog.

Call me crazy.

[aMUSEd]

Buy the Emperor's new plugin with its magic pixie dust powered DSP

[jinxtigr]

I have that on vinyl. It is absolutely killer. I'm trying to get some record bins so I can listen to my old albums more easily: that's what drove my whole career, trying to get 'that' sound out of digital.

One thing I can speak to: you can make plugins that do various flavors of 'analog', as subtle or thorough as you like, and you can come up with ways that they do that stuff without claiming to be 'emulations' of vintage, named gear.

Do that and you will get not as much hype factor and won't sell as much. People want to buy the names, the actual sound doesn't matter as much to 'em. The only difference is when someone does blind test shootouts and I think those are less popular these days. I stopped even trying to sell individual plugins and went all Patreon specifically so I could just do stuff without having to seek 'hit emulation plugins' or trade off the good name of vintage gear: it's tough to compete with a dream or someone's imagination, when that is being intentionally manipulated.

I remember once someone did do a shootout including some of the 'blah, blah, blah' at the top of the thread, and included me. But they didn't go for BussColors, my 'emulation' one. They shot out the expensive top-of-the-line 'blah' with my Channel plugin, which never really intended to 'emulate': it just did an Airwindows highpass (interleaved) and a slew clipper, gave presets for each which were close to what you'd get with API, Neve and SSL (based on measuring some impulses through that gear), and then did a saturation. Nothing more. Not really 'emulation' at all.

Blind, it still beat the 'blah blah' entry for some. And even then it was free

Beware the hype. Hype is not your friend. I sort of quit the business, in a sense, because it was getting too hypey.

As for digital versus analog, I'm getting into working with analog stuff more than ever. I'm building a second xoxbox and have some great mods for xoxen, and I picked up a Yamaha AN-200 (virtual analog classic in a groovebox form). That Yamaha can produce some impressively lush, vibey noises and if you don't listen to anything else you might easily think it's lots like analog.

Then you fire up the actual xoxbox for like three seconds, and it's chalk and cheese: so obviously a whole other thing. The Yamaha is an apparition and very pretty, the xox sounds like an object sitting there. I think I might end up encouraging people to abandon all the software including mine, and build electric stuff (and not digital stuff), or hybrid stuff that can use both. I've also got an old Midiverb (first version with the RCA jacks) and in some ways it kills anything I can do inside the computer. All our cleverness with digital, and it's still chalk and cheese compared with what analog stuff can do (or some of the freaky old early digital stuff).

[wagtunes]

I have that on vinyl. It is absolutely killer. I'm trying to get some record bins so I can listen to my old albums more easily: that's what drove my whole career, trying to get 'that' sound out of digital.

One thing I can speak to: you can make plugins that do various flavors of 'analog', as subtle or thorough as you like, and you can come up with ways that they do that stuff without claiming to be 'emulations' of vintage, named gear.

Do that and you will get not as much hype factor and won't sell as much. People want to buy the names, the actual sound doesn't matter as much to 'em. The only difference is when someone does blind test shootouts and I think those are less popular these days. I stopped even trying to sell individual plugins and went all Patreon specifically so I could just do stuff without having to seek 'hit emulation plugins' or trade off the good name of vintage gear: it's tough to compete with a dream or someone's imagination, when that is being intentionally manipulated.

I remember once someone did do a shootout including some of the 'blah, blah, blah' at the top of the thread, and included me. But they didn't go for BussColors, my 'emulation' one. They shot out the expensive top-of-the-line 'blah' with my Channel plugin, which never really intended to 'emulate': it just did an Airwindows highpass (interleaved) and a slew clipper, gave presets for each which were close to what you'd get with API, Neve and SSL (based on measuring some impulses through that gear), and then did a saturation. Nothing more. Not really 'emulation' at all.

Blind, it still beat the 'blah blah' entry for some. And even then it was free

Beware the hype. Hype is not your friend. I sort of quit the business, in a sense, because it was getting too hypey.

As for digital versus analog, I'm getting into working with analog stuff more than ever. I'm building a second xoxbox and have some great mods for xoxen, and I picked up a Yamaha AN-200 (virtual analog classic in a groovebox form). That Yamaha can produce some impressively lush, vibey noises and if you don't listen to anything else you might easily think it's lots like analog.

Then you fire up the actual xoxbox for like three seconds, and it's chalk and cheese: so obviously a whole other thing. The Yamaha is an apparition and very pretty, the xox sounds like an object sitting there. I think I might end up encouraging people to abandon all the software including mine, and build electric stuff (and not digital stuff), or hybrid stuff that can use both. I've also got an old Midiverb (first version with the RCA jacks) and in some ways it kills anything I can do inside the computer. All our cleverness with digital, and it's still chalk and cheese compared with what analog stuff can do (or some of the freaky old early digital stuff).

Thanks. Just to clarify one very important thing. I'm doing this more for my own listening enjoyment than to make other people happy. The latter is a war I know I can never win.

[momalle3]

The audio production and audiophile communities at large generally have an inexhaustible hardon for subtlety, to the point of bordering on a sort of psychosis. The number of tutorial videos on YouTube showcasing this pathology is staggering. You'll see some hotshot producer A/Bing the bypass on a DSP, and despite virtually nothing happening, will claim it's night and day. 15,000 upvotes, and 34 downvotes. It's like a sort of mass hallucination, like when you see a televangelist slapping people on the forehead to cure their AIDS, and the entire auditorium starts clapping.

My favourite example of this sort of hallucination was when a KVR user claimed to be able to hear "sample blurring" between mixes rendered at 24-bit fixed point versus 64-fit floating point. He was claiming that 64-bit FP mixes had something he called "sample blurring". He claimed so adamantly that the phenomenon was real and truly audible that a few other users decided to null-test files that he himself provided. The conclusion was that there was no different whatsoever between the files. Instead of considering the notion that he may have been possessed by some sort of acute psychotic episode, he doubled down and claimed that null-tests were an inadequate way to elucidate the effects of "sample blurring".

Cannot like this post enough!

[momalle3]

I’d suggest you demo the plugins from goodhertz. They’re made by Devin Kerr, who’se a mastering engineer closely associated with the band vulfpeck. Here’s an example

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wvpLjcXU3hY

The goodhertz plugins have a sense of humor, which sounds odd but it works really well. They can go from barely audible to over the top. The sense of humor is off putting for audio people, who generally approach the whole thing with a tone of extremely high seriousness.

For example, try “wow control,” their tape plugin. It nails the soft highs thing, and the low end bump, and both are adjustable from nothing to extreme, and it adds wow and flutter in randomized ways. You can get it sounding like vinyl very quickly

Air windows tape plugins are similarly excellent and can go from imaginary subtle to who wrecked my cassette very quickly.

I just got completely fed up with Slate—the endless hype, the stupid rack, the constant sales pitching. But when I was using vtm and vcc “naive listeners” would generally prefer the tracks with slate on them. I once did an all airwindows/all slate comparison for a gypsy jazz band and they preferred the slate version while I preferred the air windows version very strongly. It was either the addition of noise or the fact that slate was really good at getting kind of canned familiar sounds

The whole slate analog thing is cumulative—the more tracks it’s on the more effect it has.


I know the quality you are looking for and I love it: I grew up on it. But I drive the carpool for my daughters ballet class, and the four 12 year old girls always play their music in the car. If I play the stuff I like, i can hear right away how it sounds wrong to them, clanky and rough and unpolished and amateurish compared to, say, “fight song” or Selena Gomez singing “it ain’t me.”