Old 07-24-2017, 03:48 PM   #41
ashcat_lt
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Originally Posted by karbomusic View Post
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.
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Old 07-24-2017, 03:57 PM   #42
karbomusic
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Again: People like vintage analog gear for the ways that it fails to do what it was meant to do.
That probably explains my lunchbox with APIs, Neve's and A-Deigns preamps but it is still very subtle under the best of conditions. I would be onboard of course if someone over applies because they are trying to get end-to-end results from a single plugin.

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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.
One of my hidden points was, I'll put money that the majority using them by this point in time, never had the analog gear to begin with. Nothing wrong with that but I'm sure many of us find it a tad ironic that something so subtle gets overdone so much in the spirit of trying to be "true" to the original - even when guilty as charged. Conversely, I'm actually not overly excited about all analog sound FWIW as there are other distasteful side-effects (to my ear) that I don't personally like. The source sort of has to earn that need.
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Old 07-24-2017, 04:50 PM   #43
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Saturation is a must for me, but only for trying to bring old amplifier sounds to digital Electric Pianos, Clavinets or real distortion to sampled guitars.
Digital saturation even Overdrive and distortion have brittle harsh high end and still keep the thin digital image, which does have its uses.
Even my hardware modules from FPGA or DSP Processers suffer from crispy harshness.
Tung-Sol Tubes from EHX Pedals, old NIB-NOS RCA 7571s and Radial Tube Mixers give me what I need.

Radial below is great for Guitar samples and Electric Pianos.
Think of Get Back by the Beatles, Bill Prestons EPno solo.



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Old 09-05-2017, 07:44 AM   #44
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what i've observed playing a lot with sine bank resynthesis: for the purposes of analysis, you want the signal stripped down to its essentials.

say you have 512 bands and you keep 32 from finding the amplitude peaks in the frequency domain. it doesn't sound very good in this state but it gives you more information.

then, after measurements are taken, you want to melt faces, there is absolutely no harm in performing resynthesis with parabolic, triangle, or even saw or square waveforms (remember this is the absolute bare bones representation of a signal remaining)

so what's the point? well that the same thing saturation does. every harmonic gets its own set of harmonics. you think it would cause bedlam and sound like crickets, but its actually more forgiving than one might imagine. in my case, after not just reducing to spectral peaks, but throwing away everything that's not a really really good peak, , changing the resynthesis oscillator from sine to something with harmonics actually makes it start to sound like the original signal again

other than that, in reaktor one builder found a way to perform infinite linear oversampling —which is apparently analagous to conversion to continuous time, as a crazy way to reduce aliasing, and it works amazingly well. as far as i know, it is right on the bleeding edge of the New Tricks Department, and i can confirm it plays very nice with tahn shaper in the feedback path of a zdf filter

they published a paper on it, and i've worked with the algo some, it could easily be ported to js. the only tricky part is calculating integrals for different functions, i'm pretty clueless about all that
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