This whole tape emulation thing is getting just plain ridiculous. No one who ever had to work with tape "loved" drop outs, noise, hum and modulation noise, distortion, wow and flutter, bad frequency response or pre echos due to print through that ruin a whole concert recording. Every engineer of the 60s to 80s would have thanked god for a clean digital recording without all these problems.

It seems a little bit like trying to sell a sex doll with bad breath that occasionally sh*ts in your bed and gives you veneral diseases just to be ultra realistic.

 

While this is technically true, music has evolved since. Lo-fi has crept its way into many genres, even getting its own genre.
If you'd ask engineers from the 50s a distorted guitar probably meant a failed take. A decade later it became THE most influential sound in the world.

In that regard I love Satin's manual, which goes into great depth to explain how actual tape works, the pros and cons etc. You can get the dropouts, the flutter etc. but the plugin is more geared towards a clean tape sound, like really high end stuff from back in the whatever.

 

Simulating saturation is absolutely fine, or the "abuse" of Dolby A as multiband compression. But all these negative aspects like wow and flutter, noise, hum and so on is not magic and never helped anyone to make a recording better. But people still buy it because they are told it was the analog "warmth" that made great recordings possible and everything digital is so cold without it.

 

The best part (worse?) is when you understand that

 

Last edited: Aug 15, 2023

Which is why the best tape plugins are those that allow you to dial in all the "problematic" stuff to taste
I love how tape saturation (in certain plugins) sounds. I don't care much for the flutter wow etc. except when it comes to sound design.
I love Wavefactory's Cassette for all them quirks you'd get on a bad cassette, but I'd never use it to get the analog warmth of cassette players

 

no mix knob is a no brainer

 

I have to agree 100% with your statement. Nobody wanted that noise. Indeed, Dolby and DBX made a fortune trying to keep noise out of our recordings. When the Mitsubishi X80, and X880, as well as Sony's PCM 3324 and PCM 3348, hit the market we mortgaged our souls to own or lease one of those. Analog recorders became almost obsolete. Indeed, we only continue using them to track drums, and bass guitar. Therefore, it amazes me that some of us would want that infamous noise introduced back in our tracks.

Some of us will say that music has regressed. It is just history repeating itself...sometimes for the worst.

 

Bringing back low-end tape deck dreck, how can I compare it...hey, why not let's bring back chastity belts and the A Bomb!

 

If you put it on a Send, you can send multiple channels to the single instance of it, and then just blend whatever % you want of each wet/dry. It might be somewhat disconcerting to have a tape effect applied and audible on only certain channels anyway.

 

the sarcasm is real

 

i helped developed this plugin yall hurting my feelings lol sike

 

How does music regress ? Honest question.

Bach was using compositional techniques that were already considered has been. Would you say he was making music regress?

Again, how does music regress ?
Music doesn't follow a linear progression. Music doesn't have a destination. There is no end point for music.

We can talk about how the music industry, and by extension capitalism, influence what types of music are made available, in what form, to the largest audiences, and if that hurts or not musical innovation.
We can talk about how the feeling of nostalgia has been commodified in every way possible, and how that influences art and culture.
How that nostalgia factor is used by marketing to fool ignorant consumers into buying stuff to be like X or Y from the past.

But none of those make music regress.
Music is too abstract of a concept to be regressing.

If anything, it's the opposite. There's never been a point in human history where so many people were able to create music and share with the world.

Yeah, ok. Some pop songs of the past made bigger use of extended chords and modulations, or placed a bigger emphasis on melody.
On the other hand, a top 10 pop song today has sound design that Stockhausen couldn't even begin to imagine in his wettest dreams.
And I could give less shits about top 10 songs

I agree to a certain extent.
What made Steely Dan or Fleetwood Mac albums sound so good wasn't hiss, or flutter, or any other by products engineers were fighting to overcome.
Adding them with a plugin won't make your mix sound closer to those guys.

Now that we've recording equipment that doesn't produce any noise or hiss, does that mean adding them is a step backwards?
Of course not.

Burial's Untrue is considered one of the most important albums of the 21st century -thus far.
It has noise all over it. That doesn't prevent it from sounding futuristic, even 20 years after its release.

Actually... I wonder how it would sound without noise.. Wait a sec.

https://voca.ro/1iskzdY8SXHP

Dear god...

 

bro there's is no such thing as creativity anyway ....there's nothing new under the sun.....all we do is take elements and ideas from people and things that already exist and thats already here .......nobody created a damn thing on this planet

 

"My Tape Noise brings all the boys from the yard"

 

Mostly true, but I did. But don't tell anyone!

 

The question of regression or progression is purely subjective, and its answer can be influenced by the music preferences of ordinary music listeners, as opposed to trained musicians. It is all a matter of taste. And yet, there has been scientific research on this topic. One found that:

• loudness has increased by about one decibel every eight years (resulting in less dynamic range or volume in favor of quality)
  
• timbral diversity has steadily declined after peaking in the 1960s (meaning songs are becoming more homogeneous or most pop music sounding the same)
• harmonic complexity has decreased (musicians today are less adventurous in moving from one chord or note to another)

See https://sacschoolbeat.com/2085/opinion/modern-music-is-continually-getting-worse-and-wont-stop-doing-so-anytime-soon/ but also read https://jhallwrites.medium.com/the-tragic-decline-of-music-literacy-and-quality-by-john-henschen-ad69ee3c912a in which Henschen points out that although music can be measured scientifically, its quality of music cannot.

As to the question of whether introducing noise, hiss, flutter, is a step backward? I also state that it is purely subjective. For me, personally, it is a step backward.
Finally, Burial's Untrue one of the most important albums of the 21st century? Again, purely subjective. I love that album but others may not.

 

Melodic and rhythmic complexity has been replaced with timbral complexity. The study seems wrong in that respect. It seems to assume that because a piece of music only contains, say, "a drum and keyboard" and not "a drum, a keyboard and a flute" that it's less timbrally complex, which is absurd; modem music is all about the evolution of sound itself through a piece. Steve Reich must be thrilled. Not defending or dissing it, just sayin'.

 

Last edited: Aug 15, 2023

It's all part of the Musical Warming psyop conspiracy
it may have started Gradually, but anyone can feel it now.. a peculiar concise warmth toasting your jangles

 

All untrue. These arguments rely on an extremely narrow field of vision.

Dynamic reduction is only specific to certain genres of music. The worlds of Classical, Jazz, Folk, World Music and even certain areas of pop, rock and electronica do not comply with this rule.

Again, the idea that timbral diversity and harmonic complexity has decreased is looking at the world of music through a narrow lense. The argument even states "pop music" as a premise. It also depends on a timescale only relevant to a small snapshot of time. We are, for example, currently in the era of Contemporary Classical. This period began around the end of the second world war..

If it's subjective then how can "scientific" research support that claim?

I understand what you imply by this, there is perhaps currently a wider use of dissonant harmonics in many forms, particularly modern electronic compositions, but I wouldn't say that anything has been replaced by anything else, it all still exists as it had done previously.

100%

Perhaps, but technically I don't think there's a true comparison as Stockhausen, aside from the use of synthesizers (not that much changed there in truth), used organic instruments and materials which can't be said to have changed in any way. A piano is still a piano and a sheet of metal is still a sheet of metal. I think it'd be a tall order to reproduce some of that work purely electronically even now.