https://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/trtapemac/index.php?p=images

 

Enough tape machines? Where is the hype?)

 

WANT

 

coding methods, and languages are always advancing, that part is true, a lot of plugins were not possible a few years back...

that being said, i'm actually genuinely exited, alot of IK Multimedia plugin are my goto, and everything from them sounds real good, except amplitude, and all that was missing from the collection was a tape machine saturation plugin, now they've done it!

can't wait to test this in a real life situation and see how it compares to other saturation, my favorite one so far is the TAPEDESK from overloud(if you know how to use it).

 

It's about time I thought they would have a tape machine in their T-Racks from the very beginning but better late than never

 

Just tried this IK one. It sounds really really good, but it's super heavy on the CPU.

Honestly, my favorite tape plugin is from Airwindows. It sounds great, it's light and free...I've tried them all, but keep coming back to it. Blackrooster's one is my second favorite.

 

Which airwindows tape plugin in particular is your favourite?

 

Even the older ones? With older coding methods... naah!!

 

that's a big disappointment, compared to let's say Melda MSaturatorMB which can internally operate at 3072kHz (192x16)

 

but I already got these:

 

T-racks is great

 

History repeats itself, and a dog return to its vomit. This T-RackS Tape Collection is a perfect example. Having the MCI in the 80's meant that you could not afford the Studer-Revox. And having a Studer-Revox in the late 80's and early 90's meant you couldn't afford the digital offerings from Mitsubishi, Sony, and Apogee. We despised all that wow and flutter, all that fucking hiss. Now, we want to bring it all back. Not only by way of software emulation but by way of paying top dollars for badly maintained hardware for which we can't even find tapes. Guys, go to sister site and start downloading 32 bit plugins. In 5-10 years they will be worth a fortune.

 

it's all nostalgia. we think good music is about the sound quality. we know good music was produced in the past so we want "past-sounding" plugins. like if it was this simple : music in the 90's was good, how did it sound ? let's create that sound so our shitty music will be that good. how lame !

 

Good music always has been produced. I don't want to get off topic here BUT the biggest difference between those records and today's record's has nothing to do with the gear that was used. The engineers back them were engineers, it was not a 15 year old with WAVES plugins calling himself a recording AND mastering engineer from his bedroom. It took you 15 years of serving coffee, aligning tape machines, recalling sessions (by hand) to be called a recording engineer. Mastering engineer were few. A producer was just that.The musicianship was top notch. A real guitar with a real guitar player, not Guitar Lab. A trumpet player with a real horn, not so fucking preset from a Kontakt library. And singers that didn't need auto tune or Melodyne. Each stage of the recording and mixing process was delegated to their respective experts. That is what made those records so especial.

 

Last edited: Jun 14, 2019

Delete please

 

Last edited: Jun 14, 2019

Airwindows is not exactly free, the guy has a Patreon account

But yeah, his stuff is great. I like Purest Console, it has a nice subtle separation effect.

 

I both agree and disagree with you on this. Back in the Eighties and Nineties, we thought guys like Jan Hammer were the shiz-NITE because he could make his Fairlight sound like a real guitar or real drums. If anything, making a sample on a keyboard sound like a real guitar probably takes more effort than just learning how to play a damn guitar. But I get what you're saying, and you're right -- most kids these days wouldn't even know how to mic a drum kit without YouTube showing them how to do it (in)correctly, or how to do a complete audio track in one take, or what "arranging" means. I've said it before, but the whole concept of only being able to get great recordings on tape with vintage hardware going through a $100,000 Neve console is bullshit cooked up by studio owners who are fearful for their livelihood. You can make great recordings with an affordable computer, an interface and a decent collection of plugs. Because of this, unfortunately, unlike the analog days, the percentage of people who want to make music without the knowledge or skill to do so, yet have the resources to do it anyway, has gone dramatically up. If you were a fuckup back in the analog days, investing fifty or a hundred grand in the basic gear to record multi-track meant you would be spending the rest of your life working some shit job to pay off a mountain of unnecessary debt. Now, SoundCloud, YouTube, Bandcamp, Reverbnation and a million other sites are crammed full of people who basically just string a bunch of loops and arps together and call them "songs".

It's not technology's fault, though. The tools are great and I'm glad we live in a time when we actually have access to them, because there are still a few musical geniuses around that might make something incredible with them. It's just harder to pick them out of the crowd.

 

My origins were in the late 70's and I was a beginner engineer. I got better and started producing bands. It was an extremely fine set of skills. Microphone placement and selection, headphone feeds for up to 15 musicians recording live. Learning to mix. Now I do the same thing but I use very few of those skills. The methodology to achieve a similar result is a whole new skill set. I can do things now that were impossible within almost all budgets. But I will say, tape was so forgiving, so malleable. I listen to albums I did 30 years ago and shudder at the thought of doing it with my DAW. I have dozens of tape emulations from UAD, Acustica, Slate and many more and I've only found them truly useful on a few busses where 3 part harmony vocals, double tracked really gelled with a tape sim. In short, they aren't a miracle cure all. They don't bring back the "good old days"..... maybe much of the good old days weren't that good. For me there's nostalgic appeal, but it's just not possible. You can't overlay a veneer of another era onto a digital model and transform your environment into something it isn't. I'm rambling. I've just come from the dentist and the painkillers are quite good.

 

U forgot

https://www.beatskillz.com/shop/reelight/

and

https://www.audiothing.net/effects/reels/

Couple of Gems

(Toot-Toot)

 

Last edited: Jun 14, 2019