nebulae wrote: The reason I'm asking is that I just watched a video at a friend's place about how to mix "like a pro" (whatever the hell that means) and one of the things mentioned was that in an entirely digital environment, what's missing is tube, tape, and solid state saturation.
All of which are useful dependant on the musical context - as an example loads of D'n'B types have always used Cubase VST 5.1 as it's got absolutely none of the above. Sounds well 'ard rather than squish & saggy
nebulae wrote:How about tools like T-Racks that's supposed to have very analogish qualities? How about the Sonalksis compressor, which is supposed to be Neve-ish. PSP seems to have some nice options. Also, Voxengo has some good tools that have tube warming...thoughts on those?
Sonalksis is awesome but not really a mix bus comp .The Voxengo Tape Bus is pretty nice tho' if IIRC the majority of 'colouring' is as a result of convolution impulses. If you head over to Noisevault.com you can grab tons of nice impulses from the likes of Calrec, Manley, Focusrite, SSL, Neve etc. Use these with the likes of SIR and you can get a rough ballpark and start working from there. Admittedly this ain't dynamic convolution, as can be found in the Liquid Channel or Sintefex boxes, but rather linear - so in essence you can use the impulse as a broadband 'enhancement' and use the comps & limiters of your choice afterwards.
nebulae wrote:In short, what plug would you put on the master bus to reduce the "cold digital harshness" of pure digital mixing? Again, I take these comments from a "mix like a pro" video with a large grain of salt.
Yeah - everyone mixes different - that's the idea after all! There is no perfect mix that we should all be shooting for. In terms of freeware that TBT plug is nice pre comp on the mix buss - sure it ain't a RED7, LA-2A or a Pultec/Fairchild - but it does sweeten stuff none the less. The same guy also makes a nice insert plug called Greasetube and DigitalFishphones has the old THD, which is still useable, along with Endorphin which is still a fantastic mix buss tool.
It terms of payware some folks will recommend the likes of UAD, Tritone Digital, URS or even PSP as 'one stop' solutions for what your after - personally I've never found a 'one stop' solution to adding warmth to ITB mixes and will use a number of tools to achieve the result I'm after. Think of it a bit like compression: you can use just one comp to hammer the shit out of it and it will sound rank OR you can use two comps, a fast one for the peaks and a slow one after it for density. A lot of the time if you can actually hear it clearly, over an entire track, then you've already put waaay too much on - and conversely sometimes that 'vintage tape sound' was simply driving the shit out of the tape, sounded great on a Led Zep drum submix, or the old slow opto comps. As Joe Meek once put it: if it sounds right it is right
