Quote:
Originally Posted by martthie_08
yes, a little but in my opinion it is still very clear that your analog processing sounds more appealing!
I feel there is often a need to compensate more with digital mixing, which can lead to quite a chain of processing on individual channels.
Tasteful analog processing on the other hand leads to more pleasing results in a more straightforward manner, with the side-effect of "solving" issues that you'd never thought were issues until you tried to recreate the processing with the digital counterparts.
That said, I do work heavily with digital tools but having some key pieces as actual analog hardware can be helpful to give you some orientation. As much as I try to keep my plugin processing chains minimal, this does not always work. Seeing people that I regard as pioneers in digital mixing like Tchad Blake use tons of processing makes me feel less guilty about it though :)
With the example in your video, imo the snare has a more classy sound with the 1178 on it, whereas the digital processing tends to be a bit more pokey. I've been experimenting with clippers (standardClip, Ozone, UBK-1..) to address this by choking the initial transient on drums and other transient rich instruments.
|
Yes the attack phase of i.e. a snare is most difficult in digital. George Massenburg explained very good, that it is exactly that phase that can absolutely not be emulated at all. The gain is reduced so fast, but in analog a lot of things here, chaos but also heavy amplitude modulation. The AM goes up to very high frequencies than slap back to the audible range and gives inharmonic and somewhat unpredictable but nice and rich soundding distortion. The plugins can not emulate that. I personally thing that Waves (and other 1176 clones) bust the first transients of the sound a little bit to compensate at least a little bit to what they can not emulate.
If I work in the box, which is fun too, I tend to also use lots of plugins, the more the better (for me), but every plugin does less than I would do with an analog toy. To me many plugins doing less give me a better sound. The harmonic distortion that is missing in the plugs I do with decapitator, saturn or FrontDAW (United plugins). Having a combination of maybe up to 6 or 8 Plugins on the Snare often give me a pleasant sound.
By the way, in my Video about compression and harmonics there is a lot of info about this, if you want to check out. There is also a cool explanation about why we need to thing about dynamic..
https://youtu.be/AlRkidUyp9M