The Null Device Blog

This month’s Electronic Musician has another article on “warming up your digital recordings with old analog gear.”

Great.

I’m getting sick to death of every single magazine, website, and product release touting the “analog warmth” of something, discussing it as though it were the holy grail of music.

Yeah, analog warmth is nice – if you know what to do with it. Most people don’t. Running everything through an LA2A limiter may give the track that nice harmonic distortionthat analog purists so love, but if your track is mixed for shite, what you’ll end up with is a shite track with nice harmonic distortion on the low-end. Big fat analog synths are great, but if all you do is mix together a lot of big fat analog synth sounds you end up with a big fat analog mess.

It’s the cart in front of the horse problem – good, solid analog warmth and tape saturation impart their own levels of distortion and compression to various instruments, and if the tracks aren’t holding together well before that’s added, they’re gunna work even less afterwards. Much more time should be spent on the fundamentals of making a good, solid mix – or in the case of synths, a decently-programmed and appropriate sound – before the crazy routing through outboard warmers and opto-compressors and the like.

Worse yet, most people can’t afford the good stuff – a real vintage 1176 is hard to come by, pricy and often tempramental. Most project studios don’t have the budget, and all the budget digital mic-n-amp modelers in the world just don’t compare.

Mind you I’ve got nothing against that warm, punchy sound that a good tube preamp delivers. It just seems to me that if the user doesn’t know what to do with it, it’s just a big, expensive, mix-muddling paperweight.

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Originally uploaded by nulldevice.

More s’kern photos…This time it’s Dan.

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Originally uploaded by nulldevice.

A small, blurry photo of J. Ned Stromkirby, rockin’ the microphone.

For once, I’m not going to rant about music or post a silly picture of Chuck asleep someplace funny.

Instead, I’m going to discuss how much I enjoy a few things about my upgraded studio machine and its software.

Oh, how do I love my g5? It’s pretty freaking awesome. It’s not the fastest machine in production, but compared to my g4 667 it’s a LOT faster. Previously, I could run one, maybe 2 instances of Vanguard, 1 reverb, and a delay before my machine would just say “I’ve had it.” Now, I just keep adding compressors and reverbs and effects and the processor level meter barely registers a change. I’ve almost gotten processor1 up to 50%. Almost.

And now that the g5 is running, I am learning to love Logic 7.1. They fixed so much of what was wrong with previous versions…

The synths: ES2 is awesome. I never appreciated just how punchy this synth is. Sculpture is mind-blowing even though I don’t understand it and can only seem to make scrapy noises with it currently. EFM1 is less than spectacular, but I do like having an FM synth around.

The effects: They’ve added gobs of useful starting point presets. There used to be 7, maybe 8 presets for the compressor, now there’s a whole library. Entire channels can have patches, so you can save your favorite effects chain. Space Designer is a godlike reverb. The “Guitar Amp” and “Bass Amp” simulators are disappointing as guitar and bass amps – I’m spoiled by the real thing now – but they both make decent and flexible distortions.

I’ve got a mountain of software upgrades left to get to make everything Tiger and AU compatible, but so far I’ve been able to do some pretty cool things with just what I’ve got.

Mmm technology. All I need to do is write the music.