Analog this, analog that…
Posted on | August 29, 2005 | Comments Off
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.