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

[Scotty]

I love that sound you've capture here. I am going to have to budget for a fulltone hardware echo box. - Scotty

Well, I've been giving this whole subject a ton of thought the last couple of days and have decided to just abandon the whole idea of trying to capture my youth. If I want to make music that sounds like it was recorded in 1968 then I'll go find a recording studio with 1968 gear.

Funny you should mention this. I just integrated my real tube tape echo into my DAW. So now I can run audio from soft synths through it and record the resulting audio back into the DAW for mixing. I used to use echoplexes back in the 70s and 80s. I had 3 of them at one time. Great machines but not very well made and quite noisy and inconsistent. Fulltone did a complete re-engineering and build with high quality design and materials - this is what I am using now. Here's a track I just did just experimenting with running DAW synth audio out and throught he tape echo and back into the DAW. the synth is Repro-1.

When I did this, my mind immediatly brought back a ton of memories from when I was a kid using echoplexes. Love that sound! I have many of the best software tape echos - they are close to the sound but nothing sound like the real deal.

https://soundcloud.com/plexus-productio ... -tape-echo

[Synthman2000]

Very complex but a few reasons why we should not expect a vintage sound with a bunch of plug ins.

Vinyl and cassette consumer media was historically predominant
20 year experienced specializing recording engineer
20 year experienced specializing mixing engineer
20 year specializing mastering engineer
$ 2,000,000 of room design and acoustics
$5-10 million of mics, desk and outboard equipment
Direct recording to tape

That is already a gargantuan difference compared with today. Things have changed, a lot.

[ATN69]

Well, I've been giving this whole subject a ton of thought the last couple of days and have decided to just abandon the whole idea of trying to capture my youth. If I want to make music that sounds like it was recorded in 1968 then I'll go find a recording studio with 1968 gear.

And as they say in the biz, that's a wrap.

There are so many angle to this issue. Tape recorders, even expensive ones, have some degree of wow and flutter due to unconsistent tape speed. You have some degree of noise both from the tape itself and induced by all components in the signal flow (amps, filters, etc). You might also have some degree of tape saturaion. Old tech were analog with all it's quirks and limits. The bias used when recording with tape recorders will affect the result as well. In order to reproduce an authentic 60's recording you would have to take all of this into consideration. So far I didn't find any plugin that could do all of this.

On top of that, once you are done with your production and recording, you should in all fairness transfer your mastered song to a cassette or vinyl. You as a listener in the 60's were surely not using digital players or mp3 formats. This will also affect the result and what you actually hear.

[plexuss]

Well, I've been giving this whole subject a ton of thought the last couple of days and have decided to just abandon the whole idea of trying to capture my youth. If I want to make music that sounds like it was recorded in 1968 then I'll go find a recording studio with 1968 gear.

And as they say in the biz, that's a wrap.

There are so many angle to this issue. Tape recorders, even expensive ones, have some degree of wow and flutter due to unconsistent tape speed. You have some degree of noise both from the tape itself and induced by all components in the signal flow (amps, filters, etc). You might also have some degree of tape saturaion. Old tech were analog with all it's quirks and limits. The bias used when recording with tape recorders will affect the result as well. In order to reproduce an authentic 60's recording you would have to take all of this into consideration. So far I didn't find any plugin that could do all of this.

On top of that, once you are done with your production and recording, you should in all fairness transfer your mastered song to a cassette or vinyl. You as a listener in the 60's were surely not using digital players or mp3 formats. This will also affect the result and what you actually hear.

Although not directly related to the 60s I wanted to mention that the Cupwise cassette tape library for Nebual 4 works very well for capturing the sound of cassette tape recording. I use this a lot in my audio work to get a low-fi tape sound. It's more than just the amount of wow and flutter and a reduced frequency response - its the entire signal path of the machine and its mechanics that contribues to the sound.

The older audio gear is, generally speaking the less fidelity its going to have and the more variation there is going to be. tolerances were wider back in time and so the variations were wider also contributing to the sound quality. and the materials as well - all contributed to more complex less predictable and lower fidelity results. and, the way people heard things as well - in a lot of ways it was a success just to get anything recorded regardless of the audio quality.

Taking all this into consideration, its no wonder that digital audio tools are not going to be able to reproduces these kinds of audio aesthetics.

I wonder if someone were to do a library of Nebula programs based on this old hardware if that would help. I do know that those libraries I have of old gear, like the cassette tape library, are quite effective that way.

By the way, it just dawned on me that I was aiming for Tangerine Dream's mid-late 70s sound both in instrumentation and production quality with this tribute to Edgar Froese...

https://soundcloud.com/musicofplexus/fu ... headphones

[acousticglue]

Please kill this thread...

[plexuss]

Please kill this thread...

You know, I added the link to my track below and decided not to post a new post so the thread wouldn't bump. But then you go ahead and bump it with a message to kill it. Internet irony at its max. maybe think before you post. ya' think?

[wagtunes]

Please kill this thread...

You know, I added the link to my track below and decided not to post a new post so the thread wouldn't bump. But then you go ahead and bump it with a message to kill it. Internet irony at its max. maybe think before you post. ya' think?

You know, I was gonna lock it but when people act like jerks, neh, I think I'll just keep it open.

Maybe somebody will come and post videos of puppies.

[Aloysius]

Blah, blah, blah ...

Maybe somebody will come and post videos of puppies.

You asked. We deliver.

[camsr]

Real musicians pushing the limit, that's the bottom line.

[Acid Mitch]

With Christ on your side surely it’s possible to acheive the sound you want ?
Must be easier than some of the other miracles he performed.

[budweiser]

With Christ on your side surely it’s possible to acheive the sound you want ?
Must be easier than some of the other miracles he performed.

Best comment so far

[Syntilla]

'Night and day' is for the amateurs - the gullible and the delusional: "Buy this plugin and sound instantly like ..." ... some famous musician/band/producer/studio/etc.

It's like those Groucho glasses with eyebrows, nose and moustache attached and a plastic cigar: everyone can tell who you're trying to look like, but nobody wants to hear your one-liners.

[DuX]

Let's not forget that analogue also has virtual infinite bandwidth and aliasing in digital sounds like shit. These days we're tackling aliasing with oversampling and it's getting better, but still not many plugins are aliasing free.

That's the reason why I try to keep analogue in the analogue domain for as long as possible and avoid AD/DA conversion as much as possible. Once the audio is recorded in your DAW one has to be more careful with what you do with it, but it certainly sounds better to me than just VSTi>VST.

[n9]

It is completely possible to get "vintage mojo" completely ITB. This is my opinion and I think that it is true. But you need to do a lot of work.

What was the workflow of a traditional studio? Mic to mic pre to board to tape. Then mixing the tape through board with sends and buses to Master. Maybe some bouncing through a bus along the way (remember 4/8/16 tracks?) Master through EQ, comp and noise reduction to tape. Tape through mastering console to master.

Every single one of these steps would have been done with someone that knew what the hell they were doing. If you want some perspective listen to the bad garage rock records or demos of the period. Those were records made by people with bad equipment and/or didn't know what they were doing.

For each of these steps there would have been careful calibration of levels going in and out of everything to get the best tone (not the most accurate one) and to minimize noise. The engineers would be, at every step, thinking hard about where they were and where they were going with the sounds. And, my god, hard to remember now but there would likely be a lot of re-recording of things--not just because the performance wasn't quite right, but because of one of the myriad of issues that one could be having.

And remember that then these studios had a sound. The engineers that worked there had spent hundreds or thousands of hours on their own learning their board and their tape machine and their equipment. Drawing lines on faceplates with grease pencil for where this should be and that should be. When I went into Inner Ear studios in 1992 I could see a very large amount of thought everywhere into how things were zeroed and normalized. Most of the work going into my recording had been done years ago as the people that worked there had found a way to make the sound they wanted to make and how to do it again and again. I was thousands of hours away from starting from scratch.

So. Build yourself a studio in your DAW. Build yourself a workflow that involves sound -> preamp -> eq/comp -> tape -> eq/comp -> tape -> eq/comp -> tape or something like that. Figure out the gain staging. Spend a while perfecting things, with your experiments resulting in incrementally better sounds each time, working in <1db ranges with the careful gain staging in and out of each component... and learn how to push the tape too hard but the right way on the drums, the keys, the vocals and then learn some more.

But you see where I'm going.

[wagtunes]

It is completely possible to get "vintage mojo" completely ITB. This is my opinion and I think that it is true. But you need to do a lot of work.

What was the workflow of a traditional studio? Mic to mic pre to board to tape. Then mixing the tape through board with sends and buses to Master. Maybe some bouncing through a bus along the way (remember 4/8/16 tracks?) Master through EQ, comp and noise reduction to tape. Tape through mastering console to master.

Every single one of these steps would have been done with someone that knew what the hell they were doing. If you want some perspective listen to the bad garage rock records or demos of the period. Those were records made by people with bad equipment and/or didn't know what they were doing.

For each of these steps there would have been careful calibration of levels going in and out of everything to get the best tone (not the most accurate one) and to minimize noise. The engineers would be, at every step, thinking hard about where they were and where they were going with the sounds. And, my god, hard to remember now but there would likely be a lot of re-recording of things--not just because the performance wasn't quite right, but because of one of the myriad of issues that one could be having.

And remember that then these studios had a sound. The engineers that worked there had spent hundreds or thousands of hours on their own learning their board and their tape machine and their equipment. Drawing lines on faceplates with grease pencil for where this should be and that should be. When I went into Inner Ear studios in 1992 I could see a very large amount of thought everywhere into how things were zeroed and normalized. Most of the work going into my recording had been done years ago as the people that worked there had found a way to make the sound they wanted to make and how to do it again and again. I was thousands of hours away from starting from scratch.

So. Build yourself a studio in your DAW. Build yourself a workflow that involves sound -> preamp -> eq/comp -> tape -> eq/comp -> tape -> eq/comp -> tape or something like that. Figure out the gain staging. Spend a while perfecting things, with your experiments resulting in incrementally better sounds each time, working in <1db ranges with the careful gain staging in and out of each component... and learn how to push the tape too hard but the right way on the drums, the keys, the vocals and then learn some more.

But you see where I'm going.

Oh I see where you're going alright. I need to be 20 years old again and have a good 20 years to perfect this.