Tape Saturation/analog 'sound'

There are various types of saturation plugs. One fundamental of all of them is that they add harmonic distortion of one kind of another, of the sort that tubes and/or tape would add. Some of them also do a type of compression that simulates the natural distortion of tubes or tape being pushed hard.

Where you use them depends. If you are using nice, tubey, transformery, vintage type hardware during tracking, you'll already have a fair amount of saturation (or might if you are pushing the input chain bits more), so you might not need any on the indivdiual tracks and might just use it on the master buss. If something was recorded very cleanly, and you's prefer it be dirtied up a bit, you could use in those tracks or busses as well.

OTOH, you can often use it for an effect. Often drums can sound really good with heavy saturation, either on the main drum buss or on a parallel compression buss or something, mixed in with the main drum sound. It can give a full, crunchy, slightly distorted sound that can be really nice.

Anyway, it's like any other plug, use it where it sounds good, where good is left as an exercise for the reader.

A nice one for more extreme lo-fi type of effects is BlockFish, which is free and part of the Fish Fillet bundle. So check that one out. Higher end ones, that sound really nice, tend to cost a bit more. Somewhere in between would be something like Voxengo's TapeBus. A higher end one would be something like the URS Saturation plug, or on other platforms the DUY Tape and Valve plugs or McDSP's AC-1.

I've been trying out the modernAnaloger, cakewalk FX2 (YUCK!), tesslaSE and TAL-tube tape sim for the moment. with the latter 2 being the best so far

Beauty in the eye of the beholder.....................or................ another mans trash...etc.

I'd use Audio Fx before anything you listed.......................

Using Audio Fx2 and a decent EQ can get you any sounds you need...........

Brilliant avatar, Buddy. Did you come up with it yourself?

Sven

ORIGINAL: Buddy110

I've been trying out the modernAnaloger, cakewalk FX2 (YUCK!), tesslaSE and TAL-tube tape sim for the moment. with the latter 2 being the best so far

where is the best placement of the effect? (master bus?) or a varied mix across tracks with the main one on the master?

I'll stick up for the cakewalk FX2 tape sim. I wouldn't use it for the whole mix, drum bus at most, but for beefing up a bass track its combination of distortion and compression works well. I consider it more of an exaggerated tape sound which has its place. If you haven't already read the help file for it, there's a lot of good info there.

Some of the more high end ones like droddey mentioned are probably able handle a wider range of tasks from grungeing up a single instrument track to subtle enhancement on the master bus.

There's also the new TL-64 with SP8 that really lets you fine tune the saturation effect.

One technique I like is to run all of my drums through a bus that has some tape saturation on it (using the FX Tape Sim).

I use EZDrummer for my drums, so I send all of them to abus called Drums and then insert the FX Tape Sim in the effects bin of the bus. Then, using different presets, I can get a nice punchy and robust drum sound.

You could do the same thing in the Drums bus (from my example) by just creating an envelope for the FX Tape Sim itself, right?

Thanks for the detailed explanation. I'll have to give your method(s) a try sometime soon.

Thanks.

Ha! I hear ya.

How do you set up parallel compression in Sonar? Do you route a track to two separate buses with one bus basically clean and the other bus with mucho compression?

Very cool.

Thanks!

do you use that 'drums bus' then just for overall volume control?

This is probably correct. It allows you to easily adjust the level of the whole drum kit in relation to other instruments in the mix instead of drum by drum, etc.

Demo PSP mixsaturator. It is the most versitle swiss army knife of saturator I have found. Even has its own mix control and seperate processing for high and low bands. Awesome.

disclaimer... I use an MCI JH16 when I want things to sound like they were recorded to tape! Put another way, I have not yet found a tape simulator that sounds like the real thing to me. YMMV...

Of the bunch you mentioned I'd have to say I like FX2, probably because it does not do "too much".

There are a couple different mechanisms that seem to be most popular, and they are very application specific.

#1, with a bullet, is the slight compression one gets when one slams the tape. This is useful for tracking, and I tend to use it mostly for drums and other percussive stuff because I like the way it smooths out the transients a little. This is the one place where I do wish I could find a really good tape sim plugin!

#2 would probably be the EQ effect. It varies all over the map, and depends on the condition of the machine, the alignment of the machine, and the tape formulation. Frankly, I'd rather it didn't happen, and when I want EQ I prefer to reach for an equalizer<G>

#3 might be the distortion, but that's as much a function of the electronics as it is the tape. I'm on the fence, I like the sound coming back from my tape deck, but if I could duplicate it I might, especially if I could do so independently of other artifacts.

I can tell you that wow and flutter is probably not something most folks are trying to reproduce<G>! But oddly enough, and I think there is something to it, a lot of folks like the cross-talk or whatever is happening. This is mostly applicable at mixdown time, and it would be dead simple - in theory - to reproduce the effect with a bunch of sends. In practice, of course, it isn't quite so simple.

ORIGINAL: Buddy110
I was wondering if any of you guys had a good A/B audio example of a track with and without tape saturation (where its used to benefit the song).

I probably do, but you'll need the original files to really hear the difference - any data compression would likely make the whole thing moot. Let me dig around...

ORIGINAL: Buddy110
I've been trying to 'hear' the sound of it. all i can notice from the plugins i've tried is it gives a kind of 'consolidated, ever-so-slightly Mono-ish, minimally distorted, presence/Air boost' to the track, if that makes sense? or would there be a better way to describe it?

You are on the right track! But in this case hearing the effect using plug-ins is probably not the best approach. What you'll be hearing is each developer's idea of the artifacts that are desirable, and their implementation. The best way to learn about tape is to use a tape machine, and listen to the original signal and then the recorded signal... the differences will be quite clear!

Your descriptive words are interesting, btw... I wouldn't use any of them I don't think, but now I have to think about them!

ORIGINAL: Buddy110
where is the best placement of the effect? (master bus?) or a varied mix across tracks with the main one on the master?

Depends on the application...

If you are trying to faithfully reproduce the effects of recording to analog tape then you need to think about how analog tape was used. And there is no one answer... some engineers printed the cleanest possible track to tape and applied effects afterwards... some of us didn't have enough effects and processor boxes, so we printed processing a lot of the time, and effects some of the time.

I'd suggest starting with just the tape sim plug-in, as that'll let you really focus on that particular aspect of the process.

That all applies to tracking... for mixing the process is pretty well defined... everything came off the tape, through the processors and effects, and then back to tape. ARGH!!!

You can likely buy a used " decent " Tape machine such as an Otari 2 track for the price of a decent plug-in.... " Ain't nothing like the real thing".

ORIGINAL: Rbh
You can likely buy a used " decent " Tape machine such as an Otari 2 track for the price of a decent plug-in.... " Ain't nothing like the real thing".

Interesting idea!

In addition to the Otari MX-5050 series, which are quite good and very bulletproof, there are also a ton of Ampex AG-440s out there looking for good homes.

The Otari is nice because it provides half-track and quarter-track playback, if you ever get requests to recover old tapes that can be real handy!

I prefer the Ampex for editing, the transport is a tad gentler, and I just find it easier to use for editing tasks. Of course if you aren't going to edit that's not a valuable feature, and really, when I stop to think about it the only splicing I do these days is repairs to old tapes<G>!

Another worth considering is the Scully 280 family. Of the three they are probably the most finicky, but when they are set up they work well and sound great.

Otari still provides support for their tape decks, at least in terms of parts and manuals.

Ampex parts are plentiful, so if you DIY that's a consideration.

Scully parts are, at least in my experience, are a bit tougher to find, and a bit more expensive than Ampex parts, but they are out there.

There are lots of folks on the internet that are familiar with all three, and there are list servers dedicated to each brand.

All that said, a 1/4" two track tape deck is not going to sound the same as a 2" 16 track, or even a 1/2" two track. If you absolutely have to have that classic "tape sound" (whatever that is<G>) you may not be happy with a 1/4" machine.

Am track ( bundled with Samplitude ) but also available in stand alone has a very good tape sim and analogue compressor plug combined.