There's actually quite alot of very good gear from the early 2000's, if you know what to look for. The Roland gs-10 is quite a nice little box for any studio. Its saved me weeks in tweaking fx for my guitar and It has a wealth of i/o options including midi and digital outputs.
I own 4 of them -


no tubes, but it does have most of the boss fx pedals of the time built in - 100 factory presets and 100 slots for user presets.
goes from Santanna to Pink Floyd to finger pickin country western blue grass, also has a monophonic synth and bass simulator and some interesting options like adding a perfect 5th to whatever your playing for some nice jazz fusion overtones.

Big fail for Roland at the time cause guitarist just want something they can stomp on and this is a desktop unit with spearker, makes a great practice amp and I patch it one channel thru a couple guitar pedals and into a zoom 24 track, and the other channel through a doubler channel that feeds a guitar amp and then back into the zoom24, so two tracks available with enough control and difference to make the track interesting, Frequently use an equalizer and compressor in front of the unit to tune the pickups for the preset, a piezo will have certain amplitude issues if struck hard, a compressor can sort this before it hits the gs-10, the eq is useful for clearing up mud on humbuckers or toning down high freq on single coils.

This isn't expensive and its reproducible easily on track after track by noting settings, or once you get used to it, you can do it by ear. one of the benefits of a cell phone is taking snapshots of gear settings during tracks, and even better if you use the video feature and pan the camera while playing back the tracks so you have a snapshot of the sound and settings together for reference.
I also keep a digital camera or 2 or 3 in the studio for same thing without the "apple crap" of the iphone. Guess what digital cameras from the time period are dirt cheap and reliable.

Any tool is only as good as your ears and your imagination, is it worth the effort? Well for the money its worth the experiment. The gear is well built, Roland gs-10 is steel metal with plastic ears, but thats steel under those ears. They'll outlive me.

This chaps a bit of a Chatty Kathy, but eventually he gets around to demonstrating the sounds. its short 10 minutes or so, skip ahead
but remember all the sounds you hear can be applied to keyboards as well as guitar.

its a swiss army knife of fx, and mixing and patching. also a usb interface that records very cleanly to the pc if thats your thing.
has rca inputs so you can patch out your headphone jack on a laptop and run the sound through this for a bit bigger speakers for monitoring your laptop session, and that can be output to a recording device so you can have your computer tracks and your digital recorder tracks, either the same or different if you opt to spin a few dials on the gs-10 and add some reverb or delay or chorus or compression or whatver your heart desires. Also can be midi controlled for even more fun..

 

here's another fun find from the era. its a guitar pedal called Headrush, comes in two models e1, and e2, blue or gray.
e2 adds a more featured looper.

its a digital version of a tape echo.


you can hook each output to a mixer and adjust how much of each tape head you get blended into your delay/echo.
if your lazy or don't need to experiment you can just use the mix output. works with any input with appropriate levels
keyboard,bass, guitar, vocals etc.

approx 100$ last time I checked. much cheaper than an echoplex and no maintenance, no tape and no back pain.

 

If you haven't the money to buy pro analog gear such as a real tube preamp or compressor, you can stick with the good preamps in your Audient interface, and since your wish was to "warm up" your vocals, pick a saturation plugin of your liking and set up a sidechain to it linked to your vocal track and have it slightly kick in as the vocal pushes the dBs. It might come close to what what I think you are looking to accomplish. Save up your money patiently until you can buy the gear. All that starved plate stuff only makes stuff sound shrill to me, it stacks badly when used on a number of tracks and doesn't take eq well. When you can put some money into it l suggest taking a look at Audioscape hardware because they sound fantastic and are well worth the money spent. Too bad they no longer make their Golden Preamp. The quality NOS parts dried up and instead of replacing them with those of lesser quality, with integrity opted to just not make them. The Pirate bought one and sang it's praises. I have their Opto Comp and it is absolutely wonderful.

https://www.audio-scape.com/products

 

Ive a Couple of Amps "Tube ' Not Transformer "
That i Bought Just 6 Days Ago And Were So Cheap Its Almost Criminal!

Vintage "Harmon Kardon"

And i Paid £30 Per Amp!
They were in a Pawn Shop And They Didnt realise what they had!!
I instantly Started Drooling over them Both In my Mind >>


"So i took 150% Advatage Of That Situation And Didnt Alert Anybody To Just How Rare They Are, And Valuable"

Btw "Theyre Mind Bendingly Good"

I realise im slightly of topic

 

At the moment, we're all waiting for the Neve/Behringer clone ($700). There is very little chance that for such a low pricetag they have actually managed to nail the Neve sound, but let's hope so. I'll be happy to test it as soon as it is on the market (Christmas 2024)

 

My conclusion . . . ALL OPTIONS STINK. Get a good interface with built-in preamp or spend lots on analog gear.

 

Last edited: Jun 9, 2024

If you are using a clean Audient interface preamp, goto Access Analog and use the hardware you want, it's cheap compared to buying hardware and the results ar top notch world class.

 

and we absolutely love that!

 

What is Access Analog and how do you use it?

 

https://accessanalog.com

You can create the setup you want to run something through, and it is put together and done by robots. Or you make impulse responses of gear you do not own and then sell them.

 

I never heard of this. It's a paid service? Is it all IRs? Real hardware somewhere? Send out stems?

 

It's hardware, paid service.

 

You send them stems and they run it through your dream analog hardware chain?

 

Streaming to the cloud via their Analog Matrix plugin. Just read the website. It isn't fake, if thats what you mean.

 

https://www.soundonsound.com/reviews/access-analog

 

It is a remote service where you run your audio, via plugin or offline, through top quality hardware that you robotically control on your computer. It's a mature service that's been around since 2019 and can wholeheartedly recommend the service. I signed up in 2019 and use it for select pieces I don't own. I've bought several units after using them on Access Analog too, so you have access to gear you may not be able to test otherwise.

After reading your question and you telling us your current gear situation, this would be the ONLY true answer for you today.

 

Cleanest preamp possible (solid state) + anything with color (Nebula, Acqua, Decapitator ...)
So you have a bunch of colors to choose from.

And to ppl pretending "Nebula does nothing" (11:50):