Analog-ising

[damagedgoods]

This is something I'm quite interested in.

If you're into really raw, organic-sounding material and your music reflects this, how do you go about achieving this sound?

There are the very obvious candidates which we probably don't need to mention:

- Use analog synths
- Use analog compression and EQs
- Press to vinyl
- Overdrive an analog mixer

BUT I'm more interested in either lesser-known or more extreme tricks. After all, you can have a more or less digital-free setup and still get a very clean (maybe warmer) sound if that's what you're looking for, but that's not really what I'm talking about - I'm on about the super raw sounding sh!t that was a lot more common 15 years ago than it is now (though it seems to be coming back to some degree - the Seldom Felt white labels, a lot of the stuff coming through Hardwax etc). Anyway, you can also fool a lot of people using only a laptop and a couple of bits and pieces if you know what you're doing.

So, to get the ball rolling - I produce almost entirely in the box, but I have a reel-to-reel player. I bounce stuff to it and record it back, often several times. Sometimes I'll use tape saturation, other times not. I've recorded the whole set of 808 and 909 samples (to tape) and resampled them a bunch of times to get varying degrees of lo-fi. I also record tape noise and often play it in the background.

Cool way of getting (for example) electronic cymbals to grunge up with long sustain is to sequence them together with a long-decay 808 kick, run the pattern through a saturator, and then HPF the result - so you get the distorted warbling in the cymbal but without actually hearing much of the kick once it's in the mix (since the 808 kick hardly has any high frequency content if you program it right). If you just run the cymbal through a saturator on its own it'll sound pretty harsh and nasty.

The upcoming free update to NI Maschine has SP1200 and MPC60 emulation which should be very fun.

I like setting up delay feedback loops in my DAW (Ableton does this quite easily) and putting extra stuff in the loop - a simple delay and a filter, obviously, but also some light reverb sometimes and a bit of waveshaping for a reasonable tape echo.

Any other ideas?

[hydrogen]

the reel to reel sounds like the best way to do this. Good Choice.

[Phase Ghost]

I want a reel to reel....reel bad.

[hydrogen]

Since we are talking about artificially creating this warmth and sound... what collecting and about mixing slight amount of noise in each channel? or mix into a buss with the noise channel, then compressing.

[frickler]

this might help: http://www.robertbabicz.de/page16/page16.html

[coldfuture]

Guitar pedals.

Grab a few cheap ones and run sounds thru them.

The add so so so much character to a recording.

I have been using them for this since before I had any other good gear.

[tone-def]

DON'T use sounds from commercial sample CD's. they are too clean and over processed. lets not forget that a lot of the old stuff wasn't all analog.

as you mentioned NI Maschine doing SP1200 i thought you might be interested in this

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccI4X7Vj ... re=related

[thom]

Any other ideas?

Tape freak here... it's now part of my recording chain, nearly everything goes through the Otari. Different tape formulations render different results... kinda like changing tubes in a pre...

Another trick is running sounds through a speaker and a mic. Overdriven cardboard cones sound really cool. It's uhh... a noisy technique though, your neighbors will notice. But worth it!!