Here is a word for word passage from a section of the video “Top 5 mixing secrets” in the PLAP (Produce like a pro) members only section.
"Now secondly, a lot of us that work in DAWs and entirely in DAWs these days come across the same thing over and over again. And that is our mixes, our final product, sounding very very harsh. now, why would that be? Well, back in the olden days of just a few years ago, everything went through a console, was recorded through a console, was mixed through a console, had incredibly expensive microphones, usually tube microphones with transformers in it. The signal went to a mic pre that had another transformer, and just as importantly had a discrete electronics. That went to a tape machine which had a lot of transformers in it plus tape which naturally rounded off and reduced some of those brittle sounding transients. And then that went back into your console which of course and a whole bunch of transformers in it. End result, lots of beautifully smoothed off transients. Lots of lovely shaping of the top end. A lot of warmth from all of these pieces of components weather it be tubes, transformers, discrete electronics, or tape. All of these things gave us a wonderfully musical sound.
Now digital is not a bad thing. Digital is absolutely amazing. But just like digital photography the problems digital audio and digital photography are the same thing. They make everything look exactly like it is. If you get an expensive beautiful digital camera and take a picture it looks exactly like what you saw. However, 35 mm film makes everything a little smoother. The blemishes disappear a little bit more. What people do now in movies when they’re shooting on HD cameras is they make it look like film. They gloss it over. They manipulate it to seem smoother and more glossier and more, I suppose, ‘professional’ looking. And the same thing could be said with audio. So with audio, we have so many different things we can do to make the sound more pleasing."
I couldn’t help noticing the similarities between his comment and Dave Pensados.
Honestly, I never understood why Waves and UAD put so much work into tape saturation plugins. I honestly didn’t get it. And I never used them. Now I know what’s going on here. Transient shaping. Ding ding ding!!!
I was pretty much born after the true ‘analog’ era had ended. I first started recording on PT and Sonar in the early 90’s, and so I never really mentally absorbed the differences in the sound. Workflow, and cost of maintenance aside, I’m content to use plugins to mimc these effects. But what it does is leave younger guys like me are often at a loss to really understand what they’re even supposed to do (edit: with plugins that mimics older analog gear) in the first place.
I occasionally get plugins in a bundle and I literally have no idea why someone even bothered copying the piece of analog gear they’re designed to mimic. That in turn leaves you pretty clueless how to apply them.
I would disagree that digital is “exactly” how things are or exactly how we perceive them. With high enough resolution our brains are fooled to believe that, but it doesn’t mean it’s true. Analog is a “capture method”, digital is also a capture method. Both invented by human beings (not nature) to reproduce performances.
If you took a motion picture film camera, and filmed a scene, then in the editing room realized that it’s only a bunch of still pictures replaying at 30 frames per second (or whatever rate), you’d know that this is not “real” but only real enough to fool our brains to think it’s real.
Digital audio at low sample rates or bit rates will sound like shit. It’s still digital, but does it sound like real life “exactly”. Not at all. Boost the resolution and bit rate and yeah your brain is fooled to think that’s real. It’s just digital samples moving in time like the film camera frames in a sense.
Take a digital picture on very low resolution … same thing, looks like shit [pixelated], not real. Boost the resolution and it fools the brain.
Analog audio might be a little closer in one sense to real, if it weren’t colored by transformers and such. It is “analogous” to real life. It’s closer to how our brain might actually experience something.
Explaining how a system works does not somehow destroy its functionality. The point is that digital audio gives a more accurate representation of the source than taped audio, regardless of how it actually goes about doing it.
Yes, I’ll agree with that (given the requisite resolution to accomplish it). I like the phrasing “accurate representation” as opposed to “real” or “exactly”. Digital does avoid things like tape bias (rolloff) and the inevitable transformer or tube coloring in just about any analog system.
I was thinking of stuff like the Studer A800, Tonelux MP5A, @bozmillar Bark of Dog (or UAD voice of God), Ratshack reverb, Waves PS22, and the STA preamp, where you hear the effect of it, but the purpose and overall nature isn’t self evident. I mean you put it on the track, turn a knob, then scratch your head and be like…why the hell did someone go to work of modeling this piece of shit!? People have said the same about the Slate and Waves summing sims. If you don’t understand the concept of a summing mixer, someone could easily throw the plug only on their 2 bus and go “This is BS. I don’t hear it doing anything! What’s the point of this?”
Then when someone explains that it creates minuscule amounts of distortion after adding it to about 14 different tracks, then you manually route the channels to the virtual 2 bus summing unit, and know what to listen for, you start to understand what the plugin is all about.
So it magically sounds good once someone has explained it to you? I’d be confident enough to stick with my inititial judgement. If it sounds shit - it is shit.
No, when someone has magically explained a purpose for something, or magically explained what it did, does, or is supposed to do, then you get more out of it when you use it accordingly.
If you (or anyone) does not understand that a Neve 1073 is more a saturation plugin than an EQ plugin (which is what it appears to be at face value), you’d wonder why such a generic EQ is so popular, since when you reach for an EQ, you usually don’t grab your saturation knob first. It is not clear that the red knob is typically used as a saturation attenuator, as it is not labeled. And you also need to know that the transformer circuit in the fader path is modeled, otherwise having 3 gain stages (saturation, fader, and plugin output) makes no sense.
So yes, you have to have some of these not-obvious things explained, as you don’t magically know them, and they are counter intuitive without having hands on experience with the real hardware.
Stuff that was completely redundant, didn’t do anything, or I didn’t know how to use, I simply didn’t use. The only reason I had them was because they came in the bundle lol.