Tape recorder "vintage vibe" ?
 

In one of the many pop-up adds I see came one for
"IK Multimedia T-RackS TASCAM Tape Collection".
A plug in for your DAW I imagine. It promises to
"Give your tracks those beloved vintage vibes".

Is this really a thing ?
Does simulating the analog tape recording process make the track sound "better" , "warmer" ? What is "warmer" anyway ?

Lee

Typically, plugins that simulate tape are going to add saturation which is a combination of soft-knee compression and the addition of harmonics. As you push the effect, you'll start to get distortion.

Unless you're after some specific result, it's best to go light on those plugins because they can make your mix sound muddy if over-used.

Here's the deal with analog tape: it had two things going against it:
1. Right up until the end of analog tape machines, all tape machines exhibited a low-end playback "head bump" in frequency response. It wasn't until the last generation, around 1990, that a manufacturer beat that.
2. From the moment you recorded on analog tape, it was in the process of what is called "High-end relaxation." That meant from the moment a signal was recorded on the tape, the high-end was going away. You could record on the tape today and come back and ask, "Why on earth was I marveling about my high-end yesterday?" Once it was documented, high-budget albums were mixed, and their mixes were rushed across town to the mastering engineer before they relaxed too far. Each copy generation of the album exaggerated both the high-end loss and the low end bump. There was also increase distortion with every generation. You could tell the difference if you got the first pressing and the second by the loss of high-end, increased low-end, and increased distortion, especially if they used a safety copy for the album master rather than the cutting master.

That, rounded off high-end, increased low end, and a bit of gentle distortion, is the effect that is being emulated with tape emulators. There are really good emulators like the Ampex ATR-102. I spent years mixing and mastering to that tape deck. It is good, but it isn't cheap.

Bob

Yes - it's a thing. There are many tape emulators out there, but a Tascam deck is one of the last tape machines I'd want to emulate. Maybe that's just me, but they were generally all lower end/consumer/home recording decks (along with Fostex).

Much better options are Studer, Ampex or the MCI, which would be the decks used in so many major studios.

The benefit of a good tape emulator on a master 2-bus is a cohesive saturation that adds some glue to the mix, but over cooking it will do more harm than good, making everything kind of "fuzzy" and dark.

Quite honestly, I prefer a gentle saturation plugin on my 2-bus (I use Metric Halo Character). It's far more subtle, but still gives me an overall cohesion without being too much. It's one of those things where you can't really hear it, but when you turn it off you notice the difference.

Try it out. Two week free trial available worth a spin especially if it does not require iLok to check out.

Ah, the good old days when we learned to either live with or work around the shortcomings of the available technology.

I've been recording for a couple decades now but have never stopped to ask for a definition of, "glue" in this context. From all I've read of your posts you might be a good person to define it. Can you give me one?

Maybe it's something different than I imagine but I'm always trying to get as much separation between different instruments rather than "gluing" them together. But I'm guessing that's not what's meant.

Don't forget to generously apply both the "wow" and "flutter" controls on a good tape simulator plug-in! ;)

I imagine it’s more like the first part of French polishing with the pumice - the tiniest bit of leveling and pore filling ;)

Do you remember "loading the tape?" The practice with some was to add more high end than you needed knowing that it would disappear via the magic of high-end relaxation, taking you back to equilibrium. To load or not to load? :D

Bob

Probably the sanest way to evaluate any of these mo-betta plugins (or hardware gizmos) is to just listen to them and try to forget about what they purport to sound like. Audio marketers fly way under the regulatory radar compared to people selling, say, food or pharmaceuticals. They can get away with saying whatever they want.

And hiss. Don't forget the hiss!

We never used that term but I'd under-bias to get a bit more top end. My method was to align with 406 but actually use 456.

In the end, what I hear as "glue" is a sense of all the sounds feeling connected & breathing together. Like they all live in the same place & are aware of each other.

I don't remember calling it loading, but I do remember chasing the high end & trying to outsmart the tape ;-)

That's definitely one of the things I don't miss about tape. I do miss having the time buffer of rewind to collect my thoughts. Now I get artists in the live room yelling "let me do another right away...ready!?" the second they finish a take.