How do you use audio recording plugins to emulate vintage and analog gear?

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Mr. Conrad has a point, but if you care about your music, you make it as well as you can, whether or not earbuds and less than good speakers reproduce it accurately. Hopefully, the audio quality experienced by "the average listener" will soon improve to enable them to hear your music in all its splendor.

Plugins have a character of their own, and some get within the right ball-park. It also helps to chain plugins together to get a more accurate emulation of the hardware you are trying to replicate. There are so many fascinating ways of using them compared to linear plugins, such as using BitShiftGain to reduce the volume by 36 dB, and then increase it again with something like the Blackbox by Plugin Alliance or Decapitator by Soundtoys.

Often times, the effects in our heads aren’t actually what they sound like in practice. If you want a super clean reverb “effect”, you probably are not going to reach for the convolved Room/Hall emulation, you’re gonna go for the Plate or Algorithmic option. It’s the same with tape emulation. If you just want a warble and a bit of nostalgia, it’s actually going to be the better effect to just use the emulator instead of jumping through hoops for real tape. However, where the real stuff does come in is the mindset that you approach the music with. Recording to tape (especially via 4-track) is a specifically tedious process that leaves impressions on the vibe that cannot be put into words. But you feel it. If you want that, do the real thing.

There are some uniquely excellent plugin emulations of vintage gear, but many are unnecessary with a good EQ and quality, standard FX: reverb, compression, limiting, and so on.

Plugins?? I just run it all through Tape and Tubes.lol While I'm not kidding in some cases; The vintage plugins are pretty good. Everything sounds different than everything else to the trained ear. However, one must make a decision based on the context, budget etc as to the appropriate usage of Vintage Sounds. "warmer" is not always "better"

There’s much debate around the topic of analog plugin emulations. We delve into how they work and discuss how they are different to purely digital plugins. There isn't a single producer out here who I've encountered who 0doesn’t love vintage analog audio hardware. Many producers I've known agree that the sound and feel of classic analog hardware is hard to beat. What’s not so great is all the labor involved in setting things up and maintaining the equipment, plus it’s hard to make room for a bulky vintage synth or multitrack tape machine. Of course the objective is great sound, so, I certainly would put the time in!

I'd also recommend Lindell Audio's 254E limiter and 7X-500 compressor/limiter. Or Brainworx Bassdude (Fender Bassman emulation) Waves Abbey Road plug-ins are pretty decent as well, such as the J37 tape emulation and the REDD channel strip emulations.

I would do an A/B comparison for a client for them to appreciate the sonics of the emulation. Once that is done alot of them just love when we use them.