Recording and mixing tips and tricks.

[nightflameauto]

I went looking for a tape saturation plugin that would be useful after watching the interview with Joe Carrel and stumbled across some info online for sort of "cheating" your way into tape saturation without spending any money at all. I'm a Logic user so that's what I'll describe, but I imagine any DAW with a tape delay plugin could be made to behave the same way.

Like mentioned, grab a tape delay plugin and set your delay time to 0.0ms.


If your particular DAW doesn't allow you to use 0.0 as a setting, set it to 1ms and then use the latency compensation in the track to bump it up by one millisecond to compensate.

From there it's a matter of messing with smoothing, flutter, and distortion if available in your particular plugin (in Logic, it's available in the drop-down at the bottom of the Tape Delay plugin screen). You can achieve some really wild and out there effects, or just a slight smoothing and minor attenuation of highs like what would happen if you actually were recording to tape.

Just beginning my experiments with this and used it on a track I was in the middle of trying to get a good mix on, but here's a quick example of the difference it makes even with really, REALLY modest settings:
No Tape Delay/Saturation at all.

Tape delay/saturation added to the drum bus, the bass track, and each guitar track individually. The biggest difference seems to be the drums. Cymbals really gel better with the whole mix here than they do without it. There's a tiny bit of smearing going on in the guitars that I'll need to work with to get figured out.

Overall I think this is a useful trick for those that don't have tons of cash to toss at plugins.

Feel free to jump in and add any tips you've got when it comes to recording and/or mixing.

[nakedzen]

You could also download Variety of Sound TesslaPro and FerricTDS which are great sounding free saturation plugins.

http://varietyofsound.wordpress.com/downloads/

Another way of adding saturation/harmonics is to do a send to an empty track, load a high gain amp sim on it and mix that really low. (Possibly with a heavy handed high pass). Works great with death metal vocals.

[EndTime]

I use tape saturator/ emulators in basically every mix I've ever done.. lol.. I bought PsP Vintage Warmer in like 2002 and it was that extra sumthin that i was looking for and still look for. I almost exclusively uae it on the individual buss. So, all my guitar trax get treated seperated (eq, comp) then get sent to a guitar buss and i use the tape emulator for some extra grit and harmonics. Same thing for the drum buss, vocals, etc

I think They still even offer vintage warmer, even tho its over a decade old.. i recommen it highly. But yeah, it isn't free..

The other tape plug i use often us the tapebuss from Voxengo. It was part of their Analogflux suite. You get 5 plug ins. 2 tape style plugs, the tapebuss,and another simple plug in that basically just does some digital "smearing". Sumthin you dont really hear, but its meant to be used on every track, and if you do that it'll be noticeable. Then it had some analog delay, chorus and a reverb , i think. Nit sure if they still sell the suite, but it was only a 100 for all of those, and the tapebuss is worth it alone. I use either the tapebuss or Vintage warmer in every mix and they really are kinda key to my mix style.. simple and effective plugs..