I'm using the Waves Abbey Road plugins combined with some Slates stuff and am very satisfied of the result so far.

 

I think if you want to go full bore with this, you'll probably want to slap the women around a bit... just to keep em in line... no other way to "reproduce" that sound but to do it... no Waves plugin does the sounds of women controlled and continuously threatened with beatings by men.

Try to get it so the lead singer has a black eye for the ENTIRE album... that's a LEGENDARY Motown production trick

 

Yo need 60s talent. No amount of tape saturation, bit crushing, and down sampling will compensate for that. The artist and musicians, from that era, amazing talent, WAS THAT SOUND. Not tape and tube noise and artifacts, that they themselves were trying to get rid of. Smh

 

If those singers are as incredible as you say. Just record them using conventional technology. I guarantee not one fan will be like "naw can't hear any noise from that tape, not feeling it". If it's good, it's good.

 

+1 for the Waves Abbey Road plugins,also try the NLS Non-Linear Summer,in the EMI console mode,hope this helps you

 

there was a "motown" style sample pack not too long ago on the main site, sounded pretty dope. ive heard of that vulf compressor,things clean

 

You can fiddle around with as much as you like, BUT If you want the PROPER vintage 60's sound, you cant beat doing this:-

https://www.abbeyroad.com/online-mastering

 

Because of a thing called nostalgia. Thats the fuck why.

 

You're talking about arrangement. NOT SOUND. Completely different worlds. He's not looking to arrange, he's trying to get the "sound" of tape, tubes and harmonic distortion that was on all of the 50s-70s songs pumped out of Muscle Shoals, Stax & Motown. I cant count the number of times I've read comments similar to yours on Gearslutz. Even Bob Olhsson says the same damn thing as you. Maybe he's a bit senile now, but when people ask him questions relating to the "Motown sound" they are referring to the signal chain, the level they hit tape & how they mastered to vinyl. Unfortunately he always seems to reply about how the sound came from the artists & how they played the songs, in turn totally missing the questions.

 

Bob certainly is old but definitely isn't senile and still a wealth of information about everything relating to music production (we are both members of another forum where he pipes in regularly spouting coherently about his expertise and stories of his experiences). I don't think that there is any magic formula to manifest a 60's sound as Bob correctly intones time and again. The players and rooms, microphones and all other gear were all top notch. The hit songs were killer and the producers were at the top of their game with the ears to translate their visions. The medium of recording to tape had its sound and each machine it's own signature. Everything was analog from the front to the back end, mixes summing through oodles of wire and transformers and mastered by masters of the trade of which Bob still is to this very day.

 

What I do is, I'll get a reference track and search for mix-ready virtual instruments. I'll use FLAC formatted track, ripped from CD -- as reference track for sound searching/mixing/mastering later on. During sound searching phase, for instruments that I found quite matched, I'll remake some part of the track and compare to original track. As example, I'm currently working on searching for AC/DC Back in Black album kind of tones. I've found Platinum Samples drum blends well with reference track. And I found myself plenty of option whether to use Orange Tree Samples for guitars or use either Ample Sound or MusicLab with S-gear amp or Line 6 Helix. It just blends well with reference track without mixing yet. That's how I fake it when searching for specific sound.

 

Find an old Motown bathroom and put the horn section in it. That's the kind of stuf they actually did back then to help get that sound.

 

Madagascar! WoW!!
Send my best regards to King Julian!!!