Exactly what I was saying. Tape and console emu on every channel and return including the master bus.

 

Hell yeah..
No, I'm dead serious! I have some knowledge how tape saturation works (in non-linear way.. so maybe that's why is so hard to vst-it). If you can give me some info about this unit and/or advice how/where to use it I'd be grateful. (I haven't got the time to gooodle it yet). I also have some tape (not opened yet), but it's old (30y or so). Is it still usable? Tnx!

btw - me, an 80's kid .Always remember my father words when I was recording on cassette: "go in to red.. but not too much"

 

Back in the day I used to record everything to cassette on a Nakamichi DR-3. That was my favorite way of getting any kind of analog sound, mostly because I couldn't afford this fucking monster:




I wont lie to you. A part of me would still love to own one. Sigh.

 

Sometimes I send track audio out of my DAW into one of these that I found in the dumpster outside Value Village:

used in conjunction with one of these:

and one of these:

and maybe throw my MG50 and iRigged iPad in the chain for extra dirt and send it all back into my DAW.

I could just use the stereo inputs but where's the fun in that?

 

Yea its a well known tape recorder,a professional high end device,it was found in many broadcasting studios and at homes with high end audiophiles.
Never tried it,but read about it and seen it on ebay a couple of times.
These can be quite expensive to obtain if in good condition.
I suggest you download the manual,watch some videos on youtube
You know the famous Studer tape machines?(There is even an emulation done by Waves,sold for 299$.)
This same brand was also registered by Will Studer,its a Swiss company.
The device still needs to be tested and maybe calibrated,oiled and replace any damaged parts,depends on which
condition the device is in.
Tape recorders are fun to learn and can bring out even more creativity and sound experimenting,definitely worth having in the home studio.

 

I managed to get my hands on some plugins by Solid Slate. Someone recommended those to me. They look to be really good! I'll try these for the next track. Thanks for all the info guys!

 

The Best sounding Analogue Emulation in the Market ( to my ears ) is:

http://www.artsacoustic.com/artsacoustic_clseries.php

edi: and still testing a few but that beats 90% of the emulations out there today

 

Last edited: May 11, 2016

Oh, sweet tape. In like a week or so we'll see another round of questions on how to remove the unsubtle tape hiss.

@Trevor Gordon : From what you describe, you need harmonic-rich content.Just do make your content harmonic rich: layer sounds, eq, compress, know the reverb (that 0.5s reverb is fattening a sound big time without realising it's actually a reverb). Seriously, so many dream of wires instead of learning the basics inside-out.

 

Tape, when driven towards the top of the VU meters is a form of distortion (pleasant, but still distortion). When not driven is mostly a source of noise. If you drown all your tracks in saturation, there's no element for them to contrast to (no reference for the listener(. Plus, it's really hard to properly place that content in the mix. A sparse use of saturation in combination with more "clean" sounds will produce way better results.

 

is seems a little vague what a analog sound is to you, we be hunting ghosts forever...
what characteristic part of an analogue sound are you looking for?

 

Before we talk about "analog" sound, maybe (maybe not) tape emulation needs be taken out of the conversation because it is a medium of capturing audio and not a means of producing sound, although the treatment that audio gets from being recorded magnetically does really nice things to a waveform. There are analog oscillators and then there are software number crunching oscillators, recording consoles and that which emulate them, DAWs, Harrison Mixbus probably the best example. Hardware is sexy, software, less so. Give me a hardware recording chain any day. Run a soft synth through some iron and wires to boost the weak signal then into a hardware compressor and eq to taste will also do, and analog synth will do even better.

By the way, just got the Daking Mic Pre One in the mail and it is totally amazing sounding. So far I tested the Electro Voice RE20>Daking>Warm Audio WA76 on my hurting voice, and all I can say is OMG, I am in tone heaven, living in nirvana and accept the reality of the Godhead, . It has enough clean gain to drive the RE20 without the need of the Fethead that I felt I needed before with the Tonebeast or the preamps in the Babyface. It imparts a sheen on the signal that is truly orgasmic. Nothing can emulate this, not that which is going on here, no way, impossible.

I'm having a kind of bad day here physically, so please excuse me if I ramble.

 

On hardware part ,this whole bouncing to tape and re-importing it back in your DAW worked well back in the 90's but i think it was more of a noise addition instead of harmonics in my case.On the plugins side, someone recommended u-he satin (not sure, i think it was @Von_Steyr's recommendation) in a similar thread, and when i tried it i was pretty pleased

 

What do you guys think of VHS? Had a few buddies back in High school use that to record their band.

 

Why not just an audio tape? The philosophy behind this technique is the same.Although i don't know if the SNR and frequency response had major differences.But in the end is like film stocks.Fuji , kodak etc.Each film you were about to use had different response on the light emitted on it.That is the same with audio.Different tape manufacturers had different response and effect on certain frequencies .

On the other hand, speaking purely technical , as far as i know about tubes , the harmonic distortion (is technically wrong , but perceiving those harmonics is pleasant to the ear) had a major difference with transistors.In electronics language , transistors produce odd harmonics (which is not pleasant to the ear) and tubes produce even harmonics.Try anything that has a tube on it.Even if it is a recorder,a preamp ,anything.I think you might like it more than simple tape experimentation(on a normal recorder that usually works with transistors.Though the best scenario is a tube "powered" tape recorder.

 

The philosophy is what is cheaper! hahaah!

 

True

 

Do you think bussing my two-track to my Marshall tube head and back to my DAW would give it the goods of analog? I'd have to make a pass per channel.

I second U-He Satin, though I haven't used it for a while, I have to admit.

 

Assuming that you don't distort it (like a grunge guitar for example) seems to work.Try a little experiment.Feed your marshal with a simple sine wave and then back to your DAW and see what happens (mostly visually in an analyzer).Also your marshal specs could give you a clue, if you see the THD value.After all what do you have to loose? You might end up liking the result

 

Yes, U-he Satin.

I use a mic preamp with a tube circuit; that "warms" the sound of vocals. The Waves Eddie Kramer (or is it just "Kramer"?) plug-in that displays rotating reels of tape, tape-speed dials, VU meters, and the like, does really well if applied modestly - but the GUI is so graphics-intensive that it's heavy on CPU, in addition to that saturation-compression itself is.

It's ironic to me, to find myself wanting to put some "dirt" back into my recordings in a DAW, after having struggtled to make 4-, 8- and 16- track (the first two on cassette multitracks) recordings of my own sound as clean as possible – with the least distortion, frequency loss, and such. On the other hand, I had gotten used to anticipating the effect of bouncing and mixing in analog, particularly the sort of compression that results form "smearing" sounds onto tape and from recording signals which discretely peaked "in the red." When I made my first mixes to digital (from analog), the mixes sounded wrong, because I'd been anticipating the effet of analog-tape compression and other audio characteristics. Now I have to be careful to leave headroom in recording levels and gain-staging. I had used to wish that I could make recordings so clean-sounding as I can now, but never imagined that I'd have to rough the sound up a bit to make it more listenable.