I have to start by saying that the Scientists in Vintage Times got a lot of things right.
EQ and Compression from the 50s was great.
Microphones from that era were very good but very colored.
Having come through that time all our complaints were that the equipment we were using was not what we wanted to hear.
Too much distortion. Too much tape hiss. Consoles changing sound through the day.
Consoles changing sound as the voltage varied.
The sound of Taxi radios in the Orchestral mikes.
It was a shit fight all the way.
No decent headphone monitoring.
So when I hear about the great new plugin emulating everything about the Vintage Sound I know you weren't there.
If you really think the sounds were that great listen to this http://spencerlee.audio/hold/TheBeatles.mp3
This sounds terrible and you would get fired for delivering that today.
The Beatles was the music not the sound.

Wake UP we are living in the best sounding era of all times.
Spencer

 

But surely electrons behaved differently in the 50's!

Yeah man, I have had so many discussions with people about this. On a related note: often, software is better than hardware.

 

You got that right !

I never understood why someone would want to add tape hisss in there production when it used to be something we wanted badly OUT of our sound.

 

The interesting thing about hardware is that there is a finite point at which amplifiers cannot get any better. How much more noise or more distortion can you get rid of that you will be able to hear. The Texas LME49860 from 2008. Magnificent.
But algorithms a different story. DIGITAL.
Spencer

 

That is all the problem. Too many people think that by possessing material, they will be equal to someone else.
So they buy expansive gear, plugins, etc... what ever make them resemble to their stars, and at the end they are the same, but a bit more frustrated.

Does anyone who have a fender Stratocaster play's like Hendrix?...

 

I recorded a live album and Joe Walsh was playing in the band.
Tiny amp. Don't remember.
Joe went for a walk on the beach after rehersal and the second guitar player picked up his guitar and amp and played and it sounded nothing like Joe Walsh. Olymoon your point exactly.
Spencer

 

It's not about being the beatles. Transparent is transparent and colour is colour. Transparent is always needed for many tasks and sometimes colours are good. If I need colours transparent wont cut it, I really don't give one thought about the beatles or Hendrix when it's the case.

The problem with some people in both cases is that they are being ideological instead of being pragmatic, they want to make a tool choice some sort of defining thing. Digital is the way to go Analog is the only option. Whatever. It comes down to technical and esthetic choices, it comes down to choosing the right tools for what needs to be acomplished.

In absolute analog versus digital, or in the realm of digital Izotope versus Melda (or fabfilter versus dmg Audio for instance), anyone can accomplish anything if they know their tools. Even with stock plugins of any daws. Any people saying the only way to go is digital and specifically this brand or this brand is full of crap. Tools are just tools. And indeed we are damn lucky to not just have the option of coloured sound, but it's still a damn solid option when needed.

 

Talmi absolutely.
There is one thing I differ in is that all plugins are created equal.
I feel that Melda plugins are the closest thing to a direct pass through of the sound than anything else.
If you want colors there are so many ways you can get them. Whats wrong with putting a mike on the floor and putting a telephone reciever in front of it. "Tools are just tools."
We have to stop this reliance on Synths or plugins to do our creativity for us.
Spencer

 

Do you think that people like vintage plugins because of the way they are designed. I.e the eq curves on a pulteq will be setup different to how you would naturally set up your standard plugin.

I know you can replicate pretty much anything you want in most plugins but that usually comes down to the user knowing what they are looking for in the first place.

I have a lot of vintage emu plugins but in all honesty i dont use most of them either. I could probably mix most my tracks with fabfilter pro-q, a brainworx limiter and console 1. Maybe Rcompressor, apicomp and Veq4 thrown in from time to time.

 

growing up and recording in the analogue age I remember my first thoughts when plugins claimed to add flutter and hiss.
For years I've watched engineers hassling to get rid of those things on recordings.... how strange it is to add hiss and flutter when we are finally able to record without them

 

Last edited: Dec 1, 2017

vintage is not supposed to sound pristine, aren't you in some way confusing vintage and analog ?

the only interest of vintage, wether it's emulation or not, is to "sound like"

class A analog gear ( tupe amps, etc.. ) are useful if the rest of your studio (wiring, connections, speakers.. ) is top notch

the best is to mix high quality from both worlds

 

Perhaps some people feel the need for adding tape hiss because their sounds are clean and digital (softsynths, high quality samples)
I could be wrong but there may be a difference in how you work compared to others.
Some people do not record live instruments.

For instance, you want to make a 90ies hip hop track. You have a clean 808 sample.
Adding a plugin emulating an sp1200 sampler could be just the thing.
Some clients want their album to sound like it was made in the 80ies. What's wrong with that?
Should i tell them no?

Adding hiss or distorting something just to say you did it is silly. It is a musical choice.
Cuz we love the Beatles, and wanna sound like the Beatles.....

 

Outboard gear and its' iterations have been discussed for the past 2 decades @ Gearslutz. Go there to either change your mind, open your mind, or be ripped apart by professionals.

 

When it comes to analogue gear i always find synths etc have a certain depth to to the sound whilst retaining that up centre punch. I dont know if thats because of my setup or maybe im imagining it. But i defintely feel like i get the sounds i want faster when it comes to using my outboard gear compared to my software synths

 

Hiss, wow and flutter, magnetic tape artifacts, hiss and all the other negative headaches of the recording arts thankfully can be relegated to the past or now used as an artistic choice. Analogue gear need not be anymore noisy as today's engineers working in the medium can create some of the most amazing gear without the old issues that plagued the ear. Case in point, a buddy from another forum is building what to my ears is one of the most beautiful sounding tube mic preamps I have ever heard. It is quiet as well as adds harmonic pure beauty to any signal passing through its highest quality components. The circuit includes special components such as Jensen transformers, paper-in-oil coupling capacitors, stepped gain attenuators, and NOS General Electric and Telefunken tubes from the 1960s. It also looks absolutely gorgeous.
https://dansmusiconline.com/pro-audio


We don't need no stinkin' hissing...

 

I struggled for 50 years to try and make the recording chain transparent and not interfere with my creativity.
But my original quote was the Fantasy of Vintage Gear.
Using anything for creativity is cool but saying that Analog or Vintage gear gives you the sound is complete crap.
You control the sound. Its what you do to the sound that makes it yours.
Spencer

 

Listen to the four-track masters of songs from the the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album. (They're floating around the I'net; probably on YouTube). Ringo's drums sound like trash-can lids beaten with big wooden spoons, double-filtered through scratchy tube compressors (or, for that matter, through some bitcrusher plug-in). The horns and strings sound like diarrhea. All that reverb and echo through compression (good ol' EMI-engineered compressors which also yielded the shrieking-banshee presence of Mellotron strings) sounds like a mess. Paul's half-recordable hollow-body bass sounds like a giant rubberband being plucked. Why? Because the recordings were done on one four-track tape machine, then bounced to another, with more tracks added, and so forth, with tracks re-EQ'd and compressed-to-shit along the way to render them more bouncable; then mixed/mastered to two-track tape in similar fashion. Really ambitious and innovative "for the time," but that was half a century ago.

Flash-forward a couple decades, with me trying to wrest the best possible quality out of four-track cassette recorders. Although my recordings received compliments (as in people asking "what studio" I'd recorded them in), it was a lotta work to get things sounding just-right in their own rights and also in anticipation of bouncing tracks. Flash-forward two decades even later, I'm using Logic Pro and wanting to cry because such great-sounding and easy-to-use means of production hadn't been available to me a couple decaces eariler. All that painstaking care to get tape sounding just-right (though never quite-right) had really drained energy away from my performances, and made me overly-conscious of having to get the performances just-right. All the effects and processors built into Logic were an abandoned dream finally come true.

I don't know whether anyone who, due to lack of funds, has never had to do without professional-grade audio processors, guitar stompboxes, and so forth, can appreciate what it meant to me to be able to do so much more with sound to make it sound as good as one can in the present day with easily-obtainable software. Sure, there's a warmth and a "feel" to some old analog gear, and digital audio poses a diminished aesthetic exprience for the human organism, but I myself appreciate the wonderful opportunity to express myself so fully and articulately in a great-sounding manner.

 

Last edited: Dec 1, 2017

I wonder if it is only us old guys that truly appreciate what we now have as a creative tool.
Spencer

 

Digital environment in 2017/18 is a dream come true for so many people, including me. I do things now that i could never in my life imagine i would be doing say 10-15 years ago.
You dont have to feel like a victim any more, searching and calling studios for the prices, availability...the therm home studio has been redefined.

 

You are not imagining things, trust your ears. I have a set up with mixed hardware and soft synths. Lately I have been using and comparing both. I found that a lot of soft synths have no depth to the sound it's like they are only 2 dimensional. Some devs do it right like KV331 with synthmaster, Camel Alchemy, Korg analog and digital serie etc.. But a lot of them feels like they have no life in them compared to my trusted hardware synths..just saying by experience.

 

Last edited: Dec 1, 2017