Quote:
Originally Posted by karbomusic
People like Rupert Neve went to extreme lengths to rid their gear of this 'goodness' and the extreme subtlety (or complete lack of it until pushed hard) is the result.
|
Again: People like vintage analog gear for the ways that it fails to do what it was meant to do.
I use my JS lt_diode plugin all over the place. It really is just another tanh clipper, but it talks in volts and does asymmetry a little differently from a simple DC offset. And it's band limited which is yet more mojo. ReaEQ on one or both sides if I feel like getting fancy, but really I just pull up my "18 Volt Rail" preset which is slighltly assymetrical and never quite gets to -1dbFS at the output, and is close enough to "console emulation" for most things.
For some things, though, I like to add my JS slew rate limiter. It also talks volts, and allows some pretty extreme settings, but even at realitively realistic settings, it can do a good job of rounding off the super pointies in an acoustic guitar, drum track, or even vocals.
Then I recently built a "sidechain distortion" specifically so I could put a severe low-pass on the sidechain and get something closer to transformer saturation. I'm afraid I may be addicted! Vocals, drums, busses, whole mixes, I'm wanting to stick at least a little bit on everything.
I prefer this kind of modular approach because I get to choose and set my filters and my nonlinearities independently. With most emulated plugs, those things are hidden behind the scenes and basically married together. If you like one thing about a plug, but not the other, all you can do is swap it out for another. Then that one is better the one way but suboptimal the other.
I also agree that some of the emulations are a little heavy handed, and newer "engineers" who don't actually know what any of these things mean in analog end up cranking things to absurd levels. Then again, I'm one who was never afraid to run my analog gear in the red.