Recording old school

I've been reading a lot lately about how Waves Audio, Universal Audio, Slate, Softube etc. are trying to recreate classic hardware and their analogue behaviour & then present this in digital format.  Whether this is actually approximate or not is another story. Then I got thinking, what if somebody actually mimicked how artists of the day would record and bounce to tape.
 
What if you were to follow the record techniques as close as possible including the track limitations of those times. I'm not saying it's ideal for every style of music however in a way by limiting what effects and techniques you use will force you to be more creative.
 
I'm going through an experimental stage at the moment where I don't want things to sound digital and precise at the moment.
 

I've always done it old school. I don't do midi. Couldn't program a synth if I had to. Almost every drum track I've ever used was done by a real drummer playing acoustic drums. I've used drum loops a few times, but they were made from acoustic drums. I don't do a lot of splicing and dicing when editing. I like my stuff to sound as live as possible.
 
I've used Sonar as an old school 2" tape recorder because that's what I know. Same with mixing. A little EQ, reverb, delay, etc. 

I was thinking more acoustic or organic sounding stuff rather than electronic sounds. Or real instruments as musicians and older people often refer to them as.
 

interpolated
I was thinking more acoustic or organic sounding stuff rather than electronic sounds. Or real instruments as musicians and older people often refer to them as.
 

Oh, you mean real talent?  

Slugbaby
A friend of mine did this recently, with his super-tight backing band.
Direct to PC (in a full studio), he recorded 13 full songs.
Drums, bass, rhythm guitar live off the floor.  Vocals and 2nd guitar were overdubbed.  No digital trickery.
All 13 songs were mixed.
Album was mastered.
 
All this in one 16-hour day, and it sounded amazing.  

Knowing how it was done, I'd love to hear something like that......is any of his stuff on Youtube or online?

Slugbaby
A friend of mine did this recently, with his super-tight backing band.
Direct to PC (in a full studio), he recorded 13 full songs.
Drums, bass, rhythm guitar live off the floor.  Vocals and 2nd guitar were overdubbed.  No digital trickery.
All 13 songs were mixed.
Album was mastered.
 
All this in one 16-hour day, and it sounded amazing.  

And here I thought a single song should take 6 months minimum.
 
You know, Tom Scholz old school.

Thanks Matt...will give it a listen this weekend.

I think this might have been linked to before, but even if it has been it's worth another post. A 1950s/early 60s studio using period gear and techniques.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_Q-scxybnp0

eph221
This brings up a point about the goal of acoustic capture.  In *old school* the goal was to capture the performance as realistically as possible.  Now the goal is to make it sound as good as possible after the fact through production.  What's your goal?  Would you eq a stradivarius?

The record it, then improve what you're recorded afterwards process has been around since recording moved on from just a microphone and a recorder, be that wax cylinder, a disc cutter or a tape recorder. Treating recordings with eq, compression echo and reverb was pretty normal by the 1950s. Nowadays we've more (and sometimes but not always better) tools to hand, maybe the problem, if there is one, is we over-use stuff because we have it rather than because it's adding something good to the recording we've got.

And I strongly suspect modern engineers, pros as well as amateurs, are much more inlined to use digital editing technology to try and salvage a so-so recording while an "old school" engineer faced with the same track would say "do it again". We can replace bum notes with other notes from the same track and remove glitches and so on in a way that was never practicable in the days of tape when editing audio in that way required a lot of skill with razor blades and adhesive tape. Same applies to quantising audio to sort out timing problems, something not feasible to do in pre-DAW days.

Exactly what "realistic" means isn't always clear either. Someone I know refuses to have their very nice 18th century violin (not a Strad, made by one of the other Italian makers of the same period) recorded digitally, but insists on tape. Because to her ears tape is an "exact, perfect copy" of the sound of her instrument and "digital sounds thin, scratchy and nothing at all like it." That's having one experience of using one mic then splitting the signal to tape and Pro Tools at the desk, by the way. She says she insisted on no eq, compression or added effects/processing at all.

The tape sounds to me like it's pretty saturated, but to her it sounds spot on. The unprocessed digital recording does sound a bit more harsh than the tape, but I suspect that's because the tape artifacts flatter the sound, not because digital is inherently "unrealisitc".

Hey guys,
 
Y'all should line up to apologize to eph for not being exactly like him. It might help out his ego.
 
 
 
 
I keed I keed.

Is this a good price?
 
https://portland.craigsli...e-echo/6258782516.html