23-09-2018, 01:50 PM
I've been wanting to play with the UAD Studer A800 emulation recently. I've messed with it a bit but I'd never really taken the time to take a deep dive and really push the knobs around. So yesterday, I dug through the project files for a song that would sound good with lots of tape saturation and picked "Don't Put Me On Hold".
For this track, I started out by putting a Studer A800 on every track at 7.5 ips with 250 tape. I cranked the input gain on all of the tracks to bury them in the red as far as I could without hearing anything too unpleasant. When I did this, the tracks got super bass heavy so I also rolled off some low end in front of the tape machine with Waves Q2 to bring the EQ back into balance.
Once I had all of this set up - it was starting to take on a bit of a vintage vibe so I decided to treat the mix as if I was working in an analog studio to see if it would take on even more of a vintage vibe - no editing in my DAW to remove bleed, using a finite number of compressors and EQ's, mostly relying on a channel strip plugin (I used the UAD SSL legacy channel strip for most tracks as I didn't have enough DSP capacity to run the new one on every track).
I think it came out sounding pretty cool. I've never owned a tape machine. My only experience recording to tape was with my first couple of bands when I was a teenager. So I'm not be the best judge - but there's definitely a sound to this mix that I associate with tape. Would love to hear what everybody else thinks...
For this track, I started out by putting a Studer A800 on every track at 7.5 ips with 250 tape. I cranked the input gain on all of the tracks to bury them in the red as far as I could without hearing anything too unpleasant. When I did this, the tracks got super bass heavy so I also rolled off some low end in front of the tape machine with Waves Q2 to bring the EQ back into balance.
Once I had all of this set up - it was starting to take on a bit of a vintage vibe so I decided to treat the mix as if I was working in an analog studio to see if it would take on even more of a vintage vibe - no editing in my DAW to remove bleed, using a finite number of compressors and EQ's, mostly relying on a channel strip plugin (I used the UAD SSL legacy channel strip for most tracks as I didn't have enough DSP capacity to run the new one on every track).
I think it came out sounding pretty cool. I've never owned a tape machine. My only experience recording to tape was with my first couple of bands when I was a teenager. So I'm not be the best judge - but there's definitely a sound to this mix that I associate with tape. Would love to hear what everybody else thinks...
