How do you add analog warmth?

[James Stichbury]

Hey,
I have completed several tracks and noticed on comparison to others that mine sound harsh and i guess "digital" and lack warmth. I have heard these words thrown around a lot before and now i guess i know what they mean..

So my question is, can you get warmth without analog gear?

I now notice a lot of artists mix their tracks through analog desks. I just mix it on the computer, so it never leaves the digital world. Will a desk give a better sound?

Also, i have been looking into getting some plugins for colour/warmth. I have looked into plugins such as the URS Channel Strip Pro & URS Saturation plugin as meds has mentioned these before. I demo-ed them and they definitely add noticable warmth, especially on the input setting - tube.

What i'm confused about, is whether plugin emulations such as the waves API/SSL/V series / UAD & even the focusrite liquid mix give the warmth of the plugins they are emulating, or just the frequency characteristics??

- James

[admin]

James,

Those words are thrown around quite a bit although in a lot cases they don't really describe what's really happening too well.

Digital doesn't have to be harsh. When mixed correctly it can be just as nice as analog. Don't worry about the medium just worry about the actual technique and you'll be a lot better off.

One of the things digital does well is preserve transients and high end. In the analog world this gets taken care of 'automatically' by sublte saturation and high end roll offs. The trick with digital is that its a blank canvas a lot more than analog was. So a lot of things analog sort of did for us we now have to to manually in digital. It just takes knowing what the things were in analog that made it sound the way we liked and getting digital to do the same.

Which tracks were you comparing yours too? I'd be curious to hear them.

I went back to listen to some of my old analog mixes a while ago and for the most part the biggest difference was my analog stuff had a lot less high end.

The URS stuff is really cool, I deff recommend it. I haven't tried the sat plug but I'm really curious to.

Your confusion is well founded as you allude to the saturation component of the analog stuff is generally missing on these plugs. This is partly what made me sell my UAD when I realized I couldn't jack the input up on the Pultec like a real one.

Supposedly the Waves one to use some sort of harmonic distortion but when I tested them I didn't hear it. On a real piece of gear you can easiely over drive it and hear it distort, where as these one's mostly just seem to be emulating the freq curves. The Waves ones do add a low level noise similar to the real gear at least.

The URS ones use convolution so it's still not totally dynamic but a step in the right direction I think.

To make things simple though, high end management and saturation are two of the bigger keys in getting digital to sound like 'analog'.

[James Stichbury]

thanks, that makes sense. I guess it comes down to if you know what you're doing then the tools don't matter as much... :-)

[admin]

Ya that's always a great rule of thumb