Running a song through analog?

LexLacefield

New member
Hi, I am an electronic music producer and I have been hearing a few times other producers talking about running their songs through analog to get a better sound from them. I am guessing this is at the mix/mastering part of the song but do not know what they mean. I use a daw and get sounds some samples, digital synth, my analog modular synth and recordings from my mic. What would it mean to route my songs through analog. And I know analog usually sounds better to my ears but can someone explain why? Thanks

Lex
 
surprised you do not know what they mean...

analog adds a certain character, usually through the audio going through transformers, valves and a class A discreet circuits which can transform the sound, it can be very subtle, or quite dramatic, a bit like film on a film camera, the colours are not as realistic but the eye likes them more, it's very difficult to explain why though, we are naturally biased, even academics are biased but they like to think they aren't, human beings are imperfect by nature, the imperfections are present in the analog domains that aren't there in digital, and we reflect with that.
 
Slap a "tape" plugin on your stereo bus, and call it a day....

...because in order to run your audio through some analog gear that would be a real benefit, you would need to invest a substantial amount of money into quality analog gear, in order to improve/change the audio, and to appreciate what the analog gear does for you...and that also would be subtle, and mostly appreciated by people who are familiar with quality analog gear and know how it sounds and what it does.

So just "running through" some/any kind of analog piece of gear will not really do much for you.
I think it's spread like some kind of "secret mojo" on the internet by people who have only known working with digital audio in a computer...so then "analog" becomes some magical term to them, and they spread myths about how running their audio through a piece of analog gear made such a big difference.
 
Clearly, your perfect, never been more than maximum, with excellent signal to noise and amazing dynamic music can be squashed, noised up and limited by an extra D to A then A to D stage, but without really excellent monitors I doubt you will hear the 'improvements' they claim. You can now buy as a digital plugin, the 'analogue' mastering desk from Abbey Rd studios, which claims to do this kind of stuff to your music. For some people clean is bad. For others, like me, clean is my quest. I don't see a need for my music products. It might even be fashion, or hype.
 
Or if you desire to get some true analog sound from your digital mixes, send your final mixes to someone who only does mastering and has that analog gear. Much cheaper than buying all the gear yourself and guessing.
 
I run digital sources through analog gear all day. But I'm with Miroslav. Just "going analog" means nothing unless (1) the gear is up to the task (2) you know what you're looking for (3) you have the gear that will give you what you're looking for.

Analog gear can certainly be "magical" - But just being analog doesn't mean anything.
 
Or if you desire to get some true analog sound from your digital mixes, send your final mixes to someone who only does mastering and has that analog gear. Much cheaper than buying all the gear yourself and guessing.

Right...the mastering guys who use any analog gear, will most likely have all top-shelf analog toys...the stuff that can actually make a difference...
...AND...it's in the right hands that know how to use it.

I drool when I see a well appointed mastering studio with analog gear. It's all stuff I wish I could have! :p
Nothing wrong with a digital setup...but meh...it's just software. ;)
 
Thanks for the responses guys, I have only been making music for the past 4 months so sorry if I did not fully understand the concept yet. I guess I understood that taking the song and passing it through analog gear was the point, but what I wanted to know was more exactly what kind of gear and what the process was like, but I understand that might be too complicated so I will try to read some books on it. Thanks again!
 
It really can mean almost anything and frankly you'd be better off asking the "people" making the claim exactly wtf they mean when they say "through some analog".

Some people like to record things to tape (even cassette) and then back into the computer. Some people have analog compressors and EQs that they think sound better than digital tools they have available. Some people want to break the mix out to a physical analog mixing desk. Some people even think that a box of nothing but jacks connected by resistors (passive analog summing) improves "detail" and "imaging" or something.

The physical process of course depends on what you think you're trying to do and with what gear, but it generally involves plugging one or more outputs from your interface into the input(s) of something "analog" and then plugging the output(s) of that back into the interface. It's not rocket surgery. Plug it in, turn the knobs til it sounds good.

In the end what you get is this: All analog gear has several stages of (usually/ideally) very subtle filtering and nonlinearity and also noise. A lot of little things that barely touch the audio spectrum and are just a little curvy when levels are around the nominal operating range and the slightest little bit of extra noise added in three, five, twelve different places in the circuit. It is impossible to completely avoid these things in analog. The best analog gear can get pretty damn close to flat and clean and silent, but most of the most desirable gear is kind of loved for the specific way it fails to reach that theoretical goal.

In digital those things - filters, nonlinearity, noise - don't usually have to happen in order to do whatever you actually wanted to do. Your compressor doesn't need to have three or six high pass filters in the signal path and it doesn't actually have to distort until it gets like 6 trillion times louder than your converter can go and it probably should add noise just to be safe, but that noise can be about one six-trillionth as loud as anything you can get out of the computer. In fact, if we wanted to write a plugin that included anywhere near the complexity of even a simple analog unit, it needs quite a lot of code. I mean, it's a lot of the same or very similar code, but running a bunch of different times as samples pass through our plugin. People do that, and a lot of those plugins actually do sound pretty good if you can live with the limitations inherent in most of their controls.

Me I use more flexible clean flat silent digital plugins for about everything. Some of those plugins are filters and nonlinearities that I sprinkle in and around as I see fit. It's better for my way of working, and in a lot of ways it's like building my own gadgets out of modular pieces rather than just taking something off the shelf. All of those filters and nonlinearities - in analog and in modeled/emulated analog - have at least a couple of parameters that make a real difference, but the circuit designer or coder set those for you and in most cases if you can tell at all and don't like it, all you can do is swap for another unit. In analog, if you've got some basic skills, you could get in and change components, but most plugins won't let you rewrite them.
 
Thanks for the responses guys, I have only been making music for the past 4 months so sorry if I did not fully understand the concept yet. I guess I understood that taking the song and passing it through analog gear was the point, but what I wanted to know was more exactly what kind of gear and what the process was like, but I understand that might be too complicated so I will try to read some books on it. Thanks again!

I am almost certainly the least experienced person who responded so far. Nonetheless... I'll add my inexperienced $.02 - most of which is strictly my personal opinion.

The digital realm of audio recording can and often does lend itself to a kind of sterile, squeaky clean.... maybe even harsh rendering of musical instruments/performances - or whatever is being recorded. This has it's place, it's applications. The rules are: there ain't no rules.

I happen to prefer a less sterile sound. So like a lot of people out there - I have an interest in so called "analogue warmth". I'm probably a little extreme in this sense - as far as what I'm trying to learn and create.

So - although I'm capturing and rendering on digital media - and am happy to utilize the wonderful tools that the digital editing realm offers.... the *sound* I'm chasing for my own creations is more of a 70's analogue warmth vibe. So I'm slowly but surely picking up gear that helps with that goal - and at least attempting to understand the processes that make that sound possible.

I can say for sure that the single piece of gear that has been the best bang for the buck with this goal in mind has been my recent purchase of a rack mount opto compressor (or also called a leveling amplifier). I've been happy to bus an entire mix through it, portions or submixes, and of course just using it to process a performance as it's being captured - particularly vocals and acoustic guitar.

It's early on for me... but my experience so far with processing through "analogue" and adding a warm sheen to mixes and performances... has been very positive.
 
My friend has an original, stereo Valley People Dyna-Mite that he runs everything through. Calls it a "deglosser" and I guess it does that. I see they're available for about $800 used, with new (mono) 500 series MSRP $599 (no idea if it's the same components). But, there's a plugin for $89. I'm tempted to get one and have him A/B it for me, but I suspect that between all the stuff I've got, I could get pretty close.

The pristine capability of the all-digital world is easy to get used to, but I think it probably needs something [I am guilty of leaving out] for some genres to still feel authentic. Whether that's a real piece of hardware or just sensitivity to the sound, familiarity with the canon, or just better ears, I don't know.
 
You are already listening to "analogue"! There is no such thing as a "digital" speaker/headphone and no, class D switching power amps are NOT digital!
Since the word "class" has come up beware of any gear/adpuff mention of "Class A" as being somehow superior. The fact is ALL decent small signal audio runs in class A* No mic pre designer e.g worth his NaCl would dream of doing otherwise.

The capture of the full dynamic range of an orchestra say had been the Holy Grail of recording engineers for nearly a century with 24 bit recording we have done it with room to spare. Running such a pristine recording through analogue gear can only add ***t. You might LIKE the ***t but don't fool yourself that you have improved anything.

I am sure if I could hear Massive's rig in HIS studio I would be blown away but then I am sure there is a LOT more going into that sound than just annyloggy!

*Even guitar amps said to be class A often ain't and they are usually confusing "class" with cathode biasing.

Dave.
 
Thanks, I feel like I am in the same boat as you, I definitely have a soft spot for older analog warmth sound and feel like it will be a perfect fit for my kind of spacey melodic techno. I'll read into it and learn more but in the meantime I think I will search for a mix/master studio that is equipped with high quality analog gear for my tracks. Cheers!
 
Ninety-nine percent of "analog" sound is in mixing style and technique, which can be done in digital. If you haven't gotten 99% of the way there ITB then going through analog gear isn't likely to make it better.
 
Heres my linited educational experience. In other words, I ain't no guru. :)
That "analog sound' is the cumulative result of every single piece of gear that the signal is run though, as well as recording method and mixing techniques.
In my own personal experience, here's something I've encountered.
I'm doing some projects where I'm taking recordings I did 20 years ago and dumping them into protools.
Some ended up sounding like crap. How could this be???? In theory the daw has an exact duplicate of what was originally recorded on a console to tape.
Why it sounded like crap was because now that I could easily edit, I did. With wild abandon. All niose, mic bleed, ect was surgically removed. Final mixes in the daw ended up sounding very clean. But incredibly sterile. The original all analog mixes had some punch and some balls.

So I redid the songs without crazy editing, just some minor fixes, and simply ran the tracks from the daw through the console.
Sounded analog again. :)

In short, that analog sound is a combination of many things. Some people expect to put a box at the end of the mix chain and it's going to magically transform it into that analog warmth and goodness. I think not.

Recording techniques, modern tape emulation plug ins, mixing techniques, skill and a good ear can.

Just one non-guru's opinion :D
 
Heres my linited educational experience. In other words, I ain't no guru. :)
That "analog sound' is the cumulative result of every single piece of gear that the signal is run though, as well as recording method and mixing techniques.
In my own personal experience, here's something I've encountered.
I'm doing some projects where I'm taking recordings I did 20 years ago and dumping them into protools.
Some ended up sounding like crap. How could this be???? In theory the daw has an exact duplicate of what was originally recorded on a console to tape.
Why it sounded like crap was because now that I could easily edit, I did. With wild abandon. All niose, mic bleed, ect was surgically removed. Final mixes in the daw ended up sounding very clean. But incredibly sterile. The original all analog mixes had some punch and some balls.

So I redid the songs without crazy editing, just some minor fixes, and simply ran the tracks from the daw through the console.
Sounded analog again. :)

In short, that analog sound is a combination of many things. Some people expect to put a box at the end of the mix chain and it's going to magically transform it into that analog warmth and goodness. I think not.

Recording techniques, modern tape emulation plug ins, mixing techniques, skill and a good ear can.

Just one non-guru's opinion :D

Gotcha ;)
 
Recording/Mixing skill >>>>>>> hardware (past a certain, but low point). CLA and Pensado and [name your favorite engineer/producer here] can record/mix excellent sounding songs on prosumer equipment (what we typically have in our studios.)

The equipment/software rabbit hole is one that we often fall into, but it generally does not lead to better quality results for hobbyist or semi-pro musicians/engineers.

Monitoring environment is (moitiors and room treatment/design) is much more important.

Yes man, I agree here completely that time makes anyone better. It is experience with good/bad tools that we learn from.

We never stop learning.

Monitoring and room treatment is likely 80% of a mixing environment ability to learn from. Then the percentage goes to shit, because I have heard mixing engineers/producers that have no 'ear' destroy mixes with effects and lack of understanding even with a suitable room and monitoring. I call that ********

Then some make a career of destroying mixes and blow things out of proportion.

I have seen you post recently, and welcome. I hope to learn from you and likewise.

:)
 
Great advice and points made.

Any source not created inside the DAW is most likely analog. A mic and it's associated pre amplification is an analog signal at it's most basic. A synth that you take the output from it's analog outs is....analog.

So just what is this magic that these peeps speak of in hushed tones of reverence about analog?

It's been pointed out the clinical cleanliness of digital can be grating on the human listener. It's true. As for the bandwidth thats available to a digital source....it's only limited to the analog playback system it's been sent through.

And here's where, IMHO, the "magic" of analog happens. The way it limits the bandwidth...or perhaps 'orders' is a better word for it, in a way that's more palatable to the human ear. There have been circuits over these years that have that effect on musical things in such a way as to make them 'classic' in nature and their designs are still the basis for equipment designers and builders today. Digital designers write code to emulate these basic circuits, most of which have been available since the 30's....

And why?

Because they make things sound 'right' to the human ear.

There's studio cats on here that use a completely analog path into their DAWs. They either are hold-overs from tape based days or their ears have become trained enough to appreciate what analog does to the source and have been able to afford high-end gear to do just this. I'm in the former bunch.

I can tell you this...there are pieces of gear that have been around for many many years that the design of the circuit is so good and pure that simply running a signal through them without even engaging the purpose of the device is enough to change the character of the signal and bring it into the smiling like a fool at the result.

As it has been said....there is a large investment ahead to appreciate or understand the tremendously subtle nuances this brings to the table.
 
"Subtle nuances" Cavedog? Maybe. Bandwidth? Not really, even a semi-pro tape machine, Revox A77 say can reach well past 20kHz* running 15ips when properly setup.

I find it interesting that the analogue camp is largely in the "rock/ popular" music field with its limited dynamic range. The "classical" chaps took to digital as soon as they could.

* The HF response is of course level/distortion dependent and maybe it is this "flaw" that is part of the analogue "magic" people like? I don't.

Dave.
 
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