Striving for vintage sound! Tips?

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chelseynicole

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Ok, so I'll be going into my friend's home studio soon to record my first EP and my goal is to get an old-school, vintage sound. His studio is professional, but the room where the drums are located might not be big enough to have the bassist and guitarist in as well. I know one way to get that old, open, rough sound is to record all three in one room. But if we do them separately, can we still achieve that sound and if so, how?

Some things I've heard is to only use maybe 2 mics for the drums, a mic up against the amplifier for the guitar instead of DI, and to run the bass into a DI.

Any other suggestions? Like...what about keys? Horns?

Thanks all!! :)
 
"old school" and "vintage' don't really mean much by themselves. Recording everyone in a single room (even with some gobos) will result in a more 'live' sound, with bleed between microphones. Micing a good guitar amp is always preferred over DI guitar, but if you don't have a good amp sound (or can't crank the amp up to where the sound is good), that won't matter.

Can you define, exactly, what you mean by "old school vintage sound"?
 
Lots of drugs and alcohol.

And cigarettes. Everybody smoked back in the old days.
 
vintage sound, rich sound, analog sound

I'm going to assume you're talking the heyday of analog 70's sound. I'm trying for that myself and have come up with a basic plan. To my way of thinking if you want that sound you have to do it as it was done. Analog city my friend. Find a good four track reel to reel, some good noise reduction for the tape and keep it simple ala' "After the Goldrush" Neil Young. *Just scored a dbx 150 unit for $.99 plus shipping.
 
dgvc63 said:
I'm going to assume you're talking the heyday of analog 70's sound. I'm trying for that myself and have come up with a basic plan. To my way of thinking if you want that sound you have to do it as it was done. Analog city my friend. Find a good four track reel to reel, some good noise reduction for the tape and keep it simple ala' "After the Goldrush" Neil Young. *Just scored a dbx 150 unit for $.99 plus shipping.
Click to expand...

And then convert to digital and reformat to lossy MP3 so all your fans can listen on $12 earbuds.

:rolleyes:
 
c7sus said:
And then convert to digital and reformat to lossy MP3 so all your fans can listen on $12 earbuds.

:rolleyes:
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Yeah...it sucks that for many listeners it gets diluted down to that....but still, even with crappy MP3s, you can still have and hear stylistic differences in the sound, so yeah...if you want old-school you have to at least start there.
 
miroslav said:
Yeah...it sucks that for many listeners it gets diluted down to that....but still, even with crappy MP3s, you can still have and hear stylistic differences in the sound, so yeah...if you want old-school you have to at least start there.
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I think there is a lot more to it than medium alone. Tape is just a single component.

Real acoustic space reverbs, real plate reverbs, the custom-made consoles of the day, the mic and tracking techniques and aforementioned bleed, real Hammonds/Leslies/Rhodes/A-200's/analog monosynths/pianos/etc as opposed to sampled keys, real string sections, great arrangers and players.....and way too many other things to list here.
 
Oh I agree...tape is just one component of old-school vintage sounds.
 
Ya know, everyone beats on MP3's as crappy, mostly because I think people are disillusioned about the state of the industry, but if you use a good Fraunhofer codec at 320 kbps in high quality mode the results are actually very acceptable. The differences between the original wav and the mp3 are very hard to spot. There is no reason why a vintage sound can not be faithfully captured in an mp3 of that standard.

Anyway.

What you'll notice about a lot of vintage recordings is that they are full of harmonic distortion and band passed sounds, mainly due to the recording media of the day and probably the monitoring environments. Some vocals in the 50's are straight up distorted at high volumes.

Good suggestions all round here but if you want to stay on the DAW platform, I suggest giving this plugin a go:

KVR: Vintager Toy by Solcito Música - Details

This plugin was developed for the 2012 KVR Developer Challenge and in my opinion made a FANTASTIC plugin that can give you a vintage sound very quickly. I have actually been using it on my master bus lately in 1993 mode, soft saturation, noise off, and a bit of edge. I promise you you'll find it useful. The dial goes from the present all the way down to 1933. It works!

You could use it on individual tracks or your busses to grit things up and I suppose in conjunction with a distortion plugin, it could come in handy.

I suggest everyone gives it a try. Let me know what you think.

Cheers :)
 
Mo Facta said:
Ya know, everyone beats on MP3's as crappy, mostly because I think people are disillusioned about the state of the industry, but if you use a good Fraunhofer codec at 320 kbps in high quality mode the results are actually very acceptable.
Click to expand...

Yeah....but how many of the MP3 music sites use 320 for their encoding....?
 
If you want vintage sounds you need to use the same methodology as much as you can

Have the musicians vey well rehearsed and play the songs all the way through
Minimal overdubs
close mic back then was considered 18". (Jeff Emerick got in trouble with EMI for bringing the mics closer than that to the drums when recording the Beatles)
Large spaces
Playing as a band rather than a bunch of solo parts
minimal track counts
real instruments
no pitch correction
Living with limitations and some mistakes in the performance
small number of very high quality signal processing effects in the mix placed where they would have the most impact (so not three compressors, four EQs, filters etc on every single track)

If you do all of that then tape (or tape emulation) is the last tiny piece of the puzzle
 
Thanks for the tips!

These are all awesome tips for me to consider. Here are a few more bits of info from me:

It's not an incredibly large studio space. It MIGHT be possible for the drums and guitar to track in the same room. Everything else is in another relatively small space. I'm hoping to record all three horns into one mic, but that will be done separately. I think drums, bass and guitar will be tracked at the same time. Horns and keys separate. Vocals separate.

Recording to tape probably isn't an option for us for a few reasons- budget, etc. Plus, the recording engineer doesn't have the capability for tape.

As far as sound goes, think Amy Winehouse "Back to Black." I know she recorded that on tape, but in general, that is the tone we're going for. That kind of muffled, chunky sound. Most of the music is retro soul, doo-wop and blues. Very 60s, I would say.

As far as vocals go, does anyone have mic recommendations? I have a slightly textured, raspy voice, if that helps at all.

Someone mentioned "tape emulation"...can you explain?

I know because of my limitations, I'm not going to get carbon copy of the sound I want- I understand that. I'm just trying to get as close as I can with digital recording and a relatively small studio space.

Thanks all :)
 
If you've not seen it, this is a very good read on how they got the Amy Winehouse sound;

SOS - Recording for Daptone Records

Tbh i've never done much "vintage" style stuff really. We played around at work trying to do a Led Zep track for an experiment and the big things we found were using big spaces and minimal mic'ing worked a treat and we aimed more at capturing the sound "in the space" rather than super close mic'ing everything. It's also worth playing around with ribbon mics, especially for horns and guitars.

Tape Emulation plugins are exactly what they say on the tin - you bung them on a track/buss/group in your DAW and it sounds the plugin emulates the effect of tape saturation :)
 
While equipment can have a lot to do with it, I think the attitude and thought process behind the recording is just as critical, if not more so.

For example, they only had 24 tracks to work with, and editing was a pain in the but. In todays DAWs we can fine tune everything in far more detail than "back in the day". What this means is that you can notice things like a guitarist switching pick ups, or a weird intake of breathe or squeeky kick pedal, all things we tend to eliminate from our tracks today. Another thing is that we now overdub guitar solos, which they did do, but there are also a lot of times where you can hear one rhythm guitar drop of as the guy goes to play a lead instead.

Work on your performance, meaning don't go into it thinking that you'll get 100 takes or fall into the "fix it in the mix" trap. Give yourself 3 takes to play through the whole thing and move on. Perfect intonation, and quantizing is not your answer to capturing "that vibe". In short don't be too perfect. Do a good job, but don't be so picky to make it like a clean room.
 
If you've not seen them, have a look for the "Classic Album" documentary series. There's some wonderful stuff on there. I think it was on Deep Purple's "Machine Head", where they were recording in an hotel that was closed for the season. They'd do a take as a band and, at first, they'd go and listen to it in the portable recording van outside. The problem was, to get outside involved some climbing, jumping, and essentially parkour, and then they'd have to go through it all again to get back inside. After a few trips they decided just to let the engineer and producer decide if it was a good take or not. Now, what constituted a good take wasn't necessarily playing the tracks note-for-note perfect, it was about the overall feel and vibe of each performance. And that's the point; each take was very much a performance!. As someone said earlier, treat each take as if you were performing the songs to a crowd and don't nitpick too much over duff notes, so long as the performance as a whole is good and has a cool vibe to it.
 
Justsomeguy -

Yeah those are great vids. Netflix has that, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Def Leppard, Iron Maiden, Pink Floyd, and more. It was a very interesting series to watch for sure, especially from the studio perspective. I just wish they weren't so focused on the 60s. It wasn't my era, so even though I have an appreciation for bands like Cream, I'd rather see more on bands I actually listen to.

:guitar:
 
c7sus said:
I think there is a lot more to it than medium alone. Tape is just a single component.

Real acoustic space reverbs, real plate reverbs, the custom-made consoles of the day, the mic and tracking techniques and aforementioned bleed, real Hammonds/Leslies/Rhodes/A-200's/analog monosynths/pianos/etc as opposed to sampled keys, real string sections, great arrangers and players.....and way too many other things to list here.
Click to expand...

RIGHT ON RIGHT ON RIGHT ON C7SUS !!! :thumbs up::thumbs up::thumbs up:
 
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