Pre-amp emulation for vocal recordings

Kylotan

Kylotan

New member
I intend to record some vocals in the near future - some in a pop/rock style, some in the aggressive heavy metal styles, for what it's worth. I have a Samson USB condenser microphone, which though not exactly top of the line, seems to work ok and has a fairly flat response. I have no experience of how studios record vocals, but have read plenty about it.

Reading advice from the pros, they talk a lot about the qualities of different microphones and also pre-amps. Some will say that you can't get a good recording without a good pre-amp. Yet while I appreciate the sentiment behind this statement, the fact is that when you record digitally, pre-amp or not, you just get a stream of numbers which represent your waveform, and that no matter what the hardware did to transform the audio source into those numbers, it can theoretically be replicated by software that does the same job. You might not get precisely the same quality, due to limitations of working in digital domain, but the essential effect can still be produced, just as digital compressors or equalisers can do a similar job to their analogue counterparts.

With that in mind, are there any VSTs, or combinations of them, that can go some way to taking a plain recording, and making them sound like they've gone through a decent pre-amp, whatever that means? Given that the talk is often of 'good' pre-amps rather than specific ones for a given task, I would assume they have certain features in common, which I would like to be able to experiment with. If anybody has any experience in this area, I'd love to hear it.
 
If you were to say that it's next to impossible to remove the tonal colouring applied by the microphone, or an existing preamp, then that's fair enough, but a preamp is just a signal processor like any other, and if its characteristics can be understood, it can be simulated digitally. People used to think that you can't simulate amps, cabs, and tubes, but people do a very good job of that now. Character is all in the waveform. It may be that the technology to copy it isn't available yet, but thinking that it's impossible is just superstition.

There is also no point someone like me buying an expensive preamp when the so-called individual character of it will mean nothing to me. I'm not going to be able to sample several different ones to see what is good, nor would I even know it if I heard it. So that route is somewhat pointless.

I found a preamp simulator VST last night and personally it's hard to see what effect it has on the audio unless I turn the drive up full. I suppose I will have to look at the spectrum analyzer and see what is changing.
 
try the demo of the MAGIX AM-Suite. There's a good preamp simulator called AM-phibia and not just just for vocals. You can install them in any DAW.
 
antares used to (probably still) has a mic/pre simulator...can't remember the damn name though...

essentially it just colors the sound, which you can do with eq/comp/etc...
 
blueroommusic said:
antares used to (probably still) has a mic/pre simulator...can't remember the damn name though...

essentially it just colors the sound, which you can do with eq/comp/etc...
Click to expand...

It was slated by many though...

Ask someone with decent preamps to make impulse responses of what you want? Not sure if that'd work, maybe I'll give it a go next time I'm in the vicinity of something decent.
 
Kylotan said:
If you were to say that it's next to impossible to remove the tonal colouring applied by the microphone, or an existing preamp, then that's fair enough, but a preamp is just a signal processor like any other, and if its characteristics can be understood, it can be simulated digitally. People used to think that you can't simulate amps, cabs, and tubes, but people do a very good job of that now. Character is all in the waveform. It may be that the technology to copy it isn't available yet, but thinking that it's impossible is just superstition.

There is also no point someone like me buying an expensive preamp when the so-called individual character of it will mean nothing to me. I'm not going to be able to sample several different ones to see what is good, nor would I even know it if I heard it. So that route is somewhat pointless.

I found a preamp simulator VST last night and personally it's hard to see what effect it has on the audio unless I turn the drive up full. I suppose I will have to look at the spectrum analyzer and see what is changing.
Click to expand...
You're trying to turn a very complicated issue into a simple one. That's not going to work. Just because a processor uses a series of 1's and 0's to calc something and/or display it doesn't mean that it can be easily manipulated to whatever you want it to sound like. That might be the case in the future, but in these times...not so much.
 
I agree that the possibility exists for anything to be replicated in the digital realm like mentioned above, but currently, I don 't think anything really comes that close. The problem comes with the irregularities and unlinearity of analog equipment. Personally, preamp modelers may help you get closer to something you may be after, but they are a long ways from the real deal. There are many differences such as impedence, original captured sound, varying degrees of frequency response throughout the different dynamics and settings etc... that make actual hardware VERY complicated to get a really good reproduction of. Even with EQ and compression, they really aren't as close as many people would like tho think. That being said, it does not mean that digital plugins and even emulators can't be used to great success. Even with some of the better recreations like some of the UAD, Waves, URS plugins etc... they are still very different. They are still however quite useful, especially for people that can not afford racks of top notch outboard equipment, and often a far cry better than many other plugins and stock DAW application filters.

The real problem that I see here is that you are looking for something in a specific style, yet have no idea what the style you are searching for is. Maybe you should work a little harder on figuring out what you want different instead of what equipment you wanted to model. I think that once you figure out what it really is you are after you will have a much better chance at finding the right tools to acheive it. You may find that you already have more than you thought.
 
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