How to Create an Analog Studio in Your DAW

want to learn how to turn your dog into an analog studio by the end of this video you're going to know exactly why analog Studios sounds so good and how to give your tracks that same warm analog sound let's get started hello everyone Dylan here with musician on a mission here today with another quick mixing tip for you so this one is going to be on analog gear talking about why it actually sounds the way it does like why analog gear is so sought after and what we can do in the box to actually recreate that sound but before we start we are actually giving away our entire treasure trove of mixing cheat sheets all the stuff that musician on a mission has been designing over the past year or two we are giving it all away for free so if you click the link on screen or down in the description you'll get some fantastic cheat sheets on how to compress how to EQ how to create a room reverb for your entire mix how to create a delay just for vocals plus 15 other incredible cheat sheets stuff that even I use every single time that I start a mix be on the lookout especially for the EQ balance sheet that's my favorite one of all of them so that said let's start this video off with a common misconception digital recordings sound bad you've heard that time and time again that digital just sounds harsh and gritty and grading and that the recordings that are made in analog Studios just sound unbelievable like the sound of tape and all of this stuff makes it sound so warm and thick and it makes sense why people think that because if you listen to recordings made digitally versus of recordings made using analog equipment there is a definite sound difference but it's actually not a quality difference now there's nothing actually wrong with digital recordings they're actually extremely accurate but you can make an argument that they're too accurate part of the reason that mixes with analog recorded tracks tend to sound better than mixes with digital recorded tracks is because analog techno adds a small amount of saturation to the recording so if you're unaware saturation is like the marriage between distortion and compression it naturally happens when a sound passes through a physical medium like a tube and a guitar amp or a tape machine or a mixing board or analog compressors or something like that so before we get into the actual tips of this video we need to talk about wise saturation is so beneficial to your tracks so unlike digital distortion which takes away frequencies in an instruments tone saturation actually adds new frequencies to an instruments tone that's often why it's referred to as a warm sound it's literally referring to adding more sonic energy in the lows saturation also does a little bit of compression whenever it's added to an instrument it's usually a fast attack fast release style compression so it's really grabbing on to the peaks now what that does is it's subtly decreasing the dynamic range of any instrument that it gets added to now here's why that's a magical combination you have destructive compression you're getting rid of sounds combined with constructive distortion so you're adding new sounds it makes an instrument sound both thicker and more natural rather than having any negative impacts to its tone so that is the reason why all of this analog gear from the 60s and 70s and 80s and even today is so sought after now why should saturation matter to your mixes ultimately tracks with subtle analog saturation baked-in are actually easier to mix that's because they naturally have a smaller dynamic range than digital recordings they're they're easier to wrangle in they also usually have a little bit more highs and a little bit more lows so you get kind of that exciting part of the frequency spectrum to be brought out a little bit so less work has to be done on your part to get all of these instruments to sound good together so if you don't have access to analog equipment don't worry you actually can emulate the sound of recording and mixing in a studio in or da at your own house you just have to use certain plugins to emulate the signal flow of a recording studio and a mixing studio now let's walk through what that means your signal flow is basically the path a sound takes from the microphone all the way to the tape machine to being recorded onto your tape or onto your computer all the pieces of technology that that sound goes through is what add that kind of constructive saturation that we're looking for but it doesn't stop there because most tracks are also mixed in analog Studios which means that those individual recordings are all being processed by another layer of analog equipment so let's talk about each of the layers that we have to emulate with our plugins in order to create that style of saturation that we're looking for so imagine with me that you are sitting in an analog studio a professional studio you're out in the tracking room and the engineer is inside in the control room and you're about to sing a song after you begin to sing the sound goes through the microphone into the control room now the first thing that sound hits is the preamp of that Studios channel now what a preamp does is it turns up the gain that's being added to the microphone if you've done any recording yourself you've used these before any audio interface is going to have some kind of preamp to turn the level of the microphone up so that you can actually record but really good preamps tend to add a little bit of this saturation now the next thing it's gonna hit is the actual track on the tracking board now imagine just those giant boards that you see in control rooms and Studios each one of those individual tracks has different components on it that add this saturation that we're talking about so we're gonna need to emulate that then the next thing that this sound is gonna hit is the tape machine it's gonna go through the preamp through the board and into the actual tape machine that is being used to record this session so we're going to need to emulate tracking tape now after the sessions been recorded that it's gonna move on and go to the mixer now that mixer is going to have his or her own mixing board and is going to run that sound into it so we're gonna get another layer of saturation now that sound is gonna go from its own channel into the mixing boards summing channel which is basically where all of the different sounds of a mix flow into in a DAW it's known as your stereo output that is gonna add another layer of saturation and then finally it's going to flow into another tape machine it's gonna flow into what's known as the master tape this is basically the end goal of every single sound that's being recorded once it's recorded onto the master tape nothing else is going to be added to it in the mixing process so that means there's four stages that we need to emulate before we start to mix and then two stages that we need to emulate after the mix the stages that we need to emulate premix are the analog preamp the analog tracking board the tracking tape machine and the analog mixing board and then we also have the final two steps the analog mixing boards summing channel and the master tape that we need to be putting on our own mix buss so that we're making sure that we are constantly mixing through those two sounds that way we are going to get a full picture of what it would be like to actually record and mix this song in an analog studio so how would we actually go about doing this well the first thing that I'm gonna do is add four plugins to each of my different sounds here these four plugins are going to emulate the four initial stages of saturation that happen in the analog studio once I put these four plugins on I'm going to bake them in using what's known as a bounce in place which basically just means exporting each individual audio file and making sure that all of the plugins are being processed so that we have a fully finished processed saturated sound and we don't have to go back to the original digital sound so before we get into the how-to let's actually look at what this does to the sound so I actually have a little before-and-after so first off we're gonna listen to the before track now this is a completely unmixed track all I did is just add a little bit of volume balancing and a little bit of panning but that's it everything else is just the raw digital tracks that were all done in someone's bedroom they were all home recorded and then I'm going to show you what its gonna sound like after we do all six stages of analog saturation so here's before [Music] [Music] okay and here's after and when I [Music] I'm gonna go back and forth for you because it's gonna be a lot more obvious there but you are going to hear a lot more top and you're gonna hear a lot more low-end you're gonna hear a little bit more compression and consistency let's do before and after so here's before [Music] and I didn't change any of the volume all of this was gained staged so the volume of each one of these instruments is the same but because there's been so much added into the top-end in the bottom end and so much subtle compression that's been done just because of all of these different stages saturation you know we get this almost mixed sound even though there's been no mixing actually added to it so let's look at the four plugins that you would use to get these four stages saturation the first stage as we talked about is the analog preamp that's the thing that turns up the gain of the microphone so there are tons of different emulation plugins that you can use to actually emulate this sound for me I'm going to use a Neve 1073 from Universal Audio so you can see it literally looks like a tracking board so what I'm gonna do is I have a little preamp up here and I'm just gonna turn it up a little bit I don't want to absolutely kill it I don't want to clip it or overly distort it or anything I'm just wanting to add a little bit of extra gain now when I do that that means I'm gonna be turning the volume of this up as well so I'm gonna want to make sure that I go down to my output knob right here and compensate I want to make sure that I'm gain staging the whole time I want to try to keep my peak levels around the same area doesn't have to be perfect but pretty close so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna solo this kick drum and I'm going to bypass this plug-in and let's see how loud it's actually getting so it looks like it's peaking around negative 8.4 so I'm gonna turn this on and you'll see that the volume is gonna be turned up quite a bit okay so now I'm going to take my output down until I'm getting around the exact same amount of gain we're shooting for 8.4 and it's just gotta be in the ballpark you know I got exactly 8.4 but as long as it's within like a decibel it's totally fine I could listen right now and see what the actual before-and-after is of the tone but the beauty of multi stage saturation is that each stage doesn't really add that much to the tone it's just the combination of all of these tiny little additions that's going to actually create this new sound that you're going for so the next step is to emulate an analogue tracking board now I'm using the Neve primarily for its preamp I'm not really using any of the tracking board stuff on this so I'm actually just going to go in I'm going to use slates virtual mix rack I'll get out of all this and they have a wonderful set of plugins basically called their virtual channel collection and this is specifically emulating a channel of a tracking board obviously there's a lot of different options you would have to do a little bit of research and like reading the manual on your own to actually figure out like what each of these different options did to the sound but as I said overall it's pretty subtle but I'm gonna stick with Britt and because that's actually their emulation of the Neve which is the same thing that I'm doing over here and same thing as before let's try to get to an 8.4 now I want to increase my input so that I'm getting you know around sort of three to plus one in the vu range that's usually where the best saturation usually lives so we're adding about half a DB it's really not that bad so I'm not gonna worry about turning the output down like I said you're just trying to get the ballpark the next thing that we want to emulate is the tracking tape the tape machine that's being used during the tracking session so I am going to use the oxide tape by Universal Audio it's a great emulation of a tracking style tape and there is a difference between packing tape and master tape they're just made differently they usually have different kinds of sounds so you can use the same plugin for both but if you're trying to get a little bit more of an accurate sound to what your mix would sound like in an actual analog studio you might want to invest in two different kinds of plugins so I'm gonna add just a little bit right here okay so it's peaking around negative eight and then finally we need to add an emulation of the analog mixing board so I'm actually gonna go in here and add another virtual mix rack because we want another channel get out of all this stuff and this I'm going to set it to Britt 4kg because that's basically an emulation of the famous SSL 4,000 G series that console is legendary and I honestly really like the tone of it so I'm gonna just leave it there cool okay so let's do a quick before and after so here's before here's after now we've had hardly any increase in volume and yet all of a sudden it sounds way more thick it sounds like there's a lot more top end and a lot more low-end maybe a little bit less mids but ultimately it sounds thicker it sounds more exciting it sounds more like the kind of kick that we're used to now I could go through and do this on all of these different tracks but honestly like I said the point of it isn't just to get the kick sounding good the point of it isn't just to get the guitar sounding good the point of it is to create consistency in the entire mix it's to create that glue that analog usually gives to all these different instruments it's to make it easier to mix so ultimately I really only want to see what it sounds like on everything not just on one track so now that we have our four stages of saturation we want to bake that into the audio we want be able to move on to our mix without having all of these extra plugins cluttering up our entire session Plus this is gonna save you a lot of CPU power honestly if you were to have all four of these plugins on every one of your audio tracks while you were mixing your computer would probably start to crash by about halfway through your mix so we want to bake it in because if this was recorded in an actual studio it would already be baked in so every single da is going to have a different way to do a bounce in place or a track export it might be called this is how you do it in logic so I'm just going to click on the audio file and I'm going to right click and I'm going to go to bounce and join and then bounce in place and I'm going to make sure that bypass effect plugins is unchecked if it's checked all this stuff won't actually get baked in so we're gonna leave it unchecked hit OK it's gonna take a second and export this region and now suddenly we have our new audio file but you can see it doesn't actually have any of the plugins on it but if I was to unmute this and hit play and switch back and forth you wouldn't be able to hear any difference here's the original one so basically I would want to do this throughout my mix I want to put all four of these plugins on all of the tracks get them gain staged I wouldn't worry too much about the tone but get them gain staged and then bounce them in place and then all of a sudden you have bright shiny new tracks with some fantastic analog saturation on them so now that we've bounced all of our tracks in place we want to add our final two stages of saturation which are the analog mixing boards summing channel and the master tape now that's gonna go on our mix buss or our stereo output and we're basically just going to start the mix with that on just like you would in an actual analog experience so I'm gonna go to my mixer I'm gonna scroll over to my mix buss now I have my own one set up over here just labeled mix output but this is the same thing as the stereo output on your particular dog now you can see I've got my final two stages of saturation right here one of them is another instance of slates VCC but this is actually their virtual mixbus this is their summing channel it's actually has a different sound than their regular channel plug-in which is why it's colored separately and it's recommended that you mix through it so I made sure that I had the same console selected as I did in all of my mix channels just to create some level of consistency and then I wanted to play the mix and tune in my input and output to get sort of that sweet spot that I'm looking for I'll turn off this tape machine so it would be here but this is too much because then we're getting some pretty aggressive distortion and compression and you know we don't really want that we want subtlety [Music] cool so now that we have that we are going to add our final step and that is adding our master tape so I have an amp X machine right here from Universal Audio this is a really famous master tape machine that was used in the 60s and 70s and 80s and I've got my settings how I like all of these plugins are going to have different settings and different options that you can use so I'm not necessarily going to go through a tutorial on how to set these things up but ultimately the manuals and these plugins are honestly really really helpful so let's hit play and make sure that we're sitting around our sweet spot [Music] there we go great now I want to turn up and down my volume just to make sure that I'm still getting around the same peak level alright so before getting about negative four point seven and then after okay so we could probably lose a DB [Music] ah [Music] that's probably good yeah okay so let's do a quick before-and-after so here's before that [Music] it's subtle but it manages to kind of glue everything together it makes it sound a little bit more like a record and it gets rid of some of the harshness that's up in the upper mids while still adding a little bit of top end a little bit of bottom end so that's it it's honestly really simple to get this kind of sound all you have to do is add those first four stages bake them in using a bounce in place and then make sure that you're mixing through the final two stages of saturation being the summing channel and your master tape and if you're able to do that you are gonna get such a better sound from the get-go it's gonna be a lot easier to mix your song to sound more like a record and ultimately it's probably gonna have the vibe that you're going for now a quick disclaimer you don't have to have this to make a great sounding mix you can get a pro mix without all this stuff there are tons and tons of amazing songs that were made without any of this special analog equipment so don't think that going out and blowing hundreds of dollars on some really nice analog emulation plugins is all of a sudden going to make your mix go from crappy to amazing this is just gonna add a little bit more on top of the quality that you already have it's gonna make mixing a little bit faster and a little bit easier so that about wraps it up for me make sure to give this video a like if you enjoyed it and if you really enjoyed it hit that subscribe button to get even more of these tips from musician on a mission and don't forget to grab your free copy of the entire musician on a mission cheat sheet collection we've got about 20 different mixing cheat sheets for free for you stuff on compression and EQ and reverb and your vocals and all different kinds of instruments I guarantee you'll find something in there that will absolutely blow you away so click that link in the description or on screen now to grab that is have been Dillon musician on a mission and don't forget create regardless [Music]

Channel: Musician on a Mission

Views: 141,371

Rating: 4.8903813 out of 5

Keywords: musician on a mission, rob mayzes, mixing tips, analog studio, daw tips, home studio, home recording

Id: LnsvvgjxtdA

Length: 24min 2sec (1442 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 20 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/fzorn]

Man, his 'theory' section in the beginning is really weird. What does he even mean by 'digital distortion'? Plain clipping? That adds harmonics too, don't know what he's on about with 'takes away frequencies in an instruments tone'. I also don't know how he differentiates saturation and distortion. There is the possibility of that not happening, but every distortion source I know (and I think he doesn't count expanders in that word) will compress the source. I'm also not sure what he means by 'saturation adds more sonic energy in the lows'. Harmonics will, by definition, only appear an octave above the original signal. He goes on and on with those reeeeeeally vague statements.

Sure, saturation can help your mix, but his explanation is more confusing than helpful. It seems intuitive, but he really doesn't explain what's going on well. If he explained the simple waveshaping-saturation example of sin(signal), that would have cleared up so much.

[u/griffaliff]

Great video, I'm unsure why you would put the saturation chain on every channel individually and bounce to audio when you could just put it on the master out. That's what I'm going to try or would top down mixing in that way be detrimental?