Get your UAD plugs practically free

Sadly also lacking for the music I do. There’s probably more in the country and bluegrass you seem to do, but lot of the younger people just want to belong instead of make art in metal now. And if they want to make something interesting, there is no budget. I mean sm57 or sm58 for everything is common now. There are so many bad releases and you can tell just by the cover art.

And metal it’s still better than other genres like industrial and some hardcore and electronic subgenres. I know some creative younger musicians who release interesting stuff that sells a bit but the only money they make is fixing stuff or cassette dubbing for bigger labels to sell national audio or Maxwell cassettes to younger people as novelty items. The cassettes now fall apart after a few plays.

But speaking of metal....🤘🤘

Respect. Family first. Good man.

I wasn't impressed by the Hitsville plugs. I preferred Capitol Chambers. Oxide's useful on occasion, but I never liked UAD's Studer. I prefer the Ampex ATR-102. I used Studer tape in studios all the time for a decade or more, so I wasn't coming from internet hype. It's rare I even consider a new plug-in these days. I already have so many. If I can't get some useful compression from the dozen or so compressor plugs I already have, it would be my lack of knowledge, not tools.

I've been ill for a while and selling off many things. If I ever get back to getting my recording side together again, I'd simply use hardware going in, my DAW for everything else, with the possible exception of a hardware stereo compressor and Pultec style EQ for a final mix.

To me, it's still all in the mics used. Get a KM84 or a Soyuz FET, one great vocal mic like a Chandler Redd, Neumann U87, Stam SA47 or a Soyuz 0-17 and you can do almost anything well.

Something's gone wrong at UAD. It used to take me one minute to install a new plug-in. Now it can be days of frustration. Customer service used to be accessible by phone, now, days go by before most issues are answered, and not even dealt with properly.

So sorry to hear about your wife, man. Thanks for sharing. And apologies if I overstepped in my responses above. These can be emotional issues, for sure.

And FWIW, I don't at all disagree with you about the possible divergent paths in recording futures. And I know which side I'd rather be on if I had to choose one or the other: the side with real musicians playing real instruments in real spaces. No question for me. I suspect that will become an even more bespoke cottage industry than it already has.

I also think there will probably continue to be a good deal of "gray area" stuff in the middle, where artists will have to choose which elements they can afford to be tracked live with real instruments vs. which ones they will deem "good enough" to serve their artistic vision if they're done with VIs (or even AI...). A different kind of "hybrid recording" I suppose...

And that’s why I have mad respect for you Mark.

My bromance with Mark, started first time I heard his use of delays on guitars: sublime: thought, this cat knows his shit !

If I had the "real Hardware"...
I'd still just screw things up.
But...

With greater fidelity.

All my best to Mark and Damoongo.
Chris
P.S. I might understand "Gear" being in the Top 5 at least though.

and vsti synths, sample libraries, emulations, and amp sims… often the hardware does not exist anymore. The tubes ran out. Vintage transistors and ics are often gone! Even very basic parts are gone! Stuff that was available 10 years ago does not exist anymore. The NOS tubes on many 90s records are gone. The Shuguang small signal tubes mostly used in the 2000s and 2010s are gone. The New Sensor tubes changed in the last ten years. Many of these plugins are based on things that cannot be repaired or idealized versions of the circuits that will not sound the same with modern “equivalent” parts.

Take in point players criticize the Softube Marshalls a lot but they have modeled stuff directly from Marshall’s diagrams and from golden units that are often old. So the master volume knobs and other settings feel right versus the oft unreactive neural dsp then you have the mercurial spark which is a hybrid and feels awesome and is responsive and often better than reality even if it sounds preprocessed.

Or Fuse modeled a pretty much never used Grampian 562a pa amp often used as a guitar head owned by Dominik Klassen. You’re not going to get those Mullards anymore if you buy one yourself. Or even something recent like 5150 type amps don’t have the Sylvana 6L6 power tubes of the original and the small signal tubes will often be worse than a few years ago. Some of the Russian tubes now have a pushed distorted high end and sound almost “bad digital” and JJ’s qc and psvane lol. Or even the Fuse TCS-68. The pots used on the tascams are gone. “Good” type II cassettes are gone. National Audio sucks beyond belief.

Then we get to synths and many ic based pro gear where the chips simply do not exist anymore, even for things from 20 years ago and to repair the circuits would require a total redesign for the new part that sounds a little different because the only drop in equivalent is a Chinese knockoff part with different specs made by Behringer. Hell even for old NE5532 and NE5534 based pro and hifi gear, Philips discontinued the original Signetics parts in the 2000s, the TI versions do not spec out the same and are discontinued, and less said about JRC the better. You cannot just drop them in and have it be exactly the same. Let’s not even get into audiotonix releasing SSL branded stuff with JRC4580 based circuits because it’s cheap or the ridiculous 4K plugs that distort like crazy. They’ve gone full Focusrite and nobody wants to state the obvious. The really nice, clean tone of the British made rack gear and x desk maybe 10-15 years ago is gone! You cannot get it anymore.

A lot of hardware is gone and what replaced it is plugs and digital. The choice is to use something else, to use an ersatz, or to fix it when it will not sound the same and often be using the same parts as the analog ersatz.

the classic hardware often just gets in the way. the desks are horrible acoustically, the transformer pres mess up mics like hot condensers and dynamics, the extreme distortion is unwanted. Unless of course classic means something like GML, Millenia, or Grace but who can flex those unless they’re to fulfill a contract rider? Or modernized takes on a general classic hardware paradigm like Daking, Great River, Alan Smart, Drawmer 196x and 197x lineups, Overstayer, Avedis but there are people who don’t like Daking’s push, thought Great River took a step back when it got Neve ish, and Avedis does not work on everything. Getting transformers out of DI signals for guitar in favor of super high impedance modern buffered dis is very important.

A lot of people don’t like the Smart C2 even though it is much cleaner on most settings, even for its distortion where the transfer curve on most attack settings produces far less distortion than the one on traditional SSL bus comps and clones and those brief peaks will simply be limited or clipped off later with resulting less distortion than a more aggressive attack curve that leaves overshoots that need to be limited (or saturated or clipped) off anyway. Molot GE can do similar things itb (tweak Siberian sunset preset to start with) but no SSL plug can.

Then there are plugs that take this classic but improved approach like the aforementioned Molot, Decapitator, Tupe, Satin, Inflator, the Louder than Liftoff silver bullet plug mode A, the waves and softube api eqs that let you turn off the distortion, Vintage Warmer, the various modes of the Oxford EQ, the resonances of the Renaissance Compressor and Equalizer, the slick eqs, the MDW plugs made by Massenburg himself inspired by his own gear. They do no get in the way or have ways to mitigate it while often keeping what was unique or weird about the old equipment in stark contrast to the round peg in square hole approach taken by the awful 1176 emulations that do not work.

Of course most pop music now is produced like distorted lofi hip hop and electronic dance music including the total inability to get clean vocal takes in stark contrast to golden age hip hop. 90s hip hop mix tapes done to cassette with an sm58 and maybe some dbx or alesis equipment if they were lucky were often done with more care than millionaire pop diva vocals today with tens of thousands of dollars of gear in the vocal chain. Now they let the idiot know nothing edm producers who touch the beats process the vocals and the results… are horrific. You can shoot the silly distorted pop mixer for mixing too loud and distorted but often what they sent comes to them that way and nobody with a finger on a fader or who knows what automation is would let it sound that bad. Then they give the beat maker (let’s not even call them producers. George Martin was a producer) a Grammy nom or some other meaningless pat on the back award for having a credit on a “successful” record (what does this mean in 2024? Going by the physical album sales many of these pop artists are less successful than people you would never think of. Billy Eilish sells less records now than Morbid Angel had Nielsen sales. Sure she has more of an appeal to 14 year old girls but more people opened up their wallets for a death metal band 30 years ago which shows how much the industry has fallen) and the adverts for the endorsed gear, plugs, and courses start on gearspace, beat port owned sites, and magazines. Maybe they’ll get a cringe tape op interview one day.

Dan

seems like we’re mostly in agreement but I do find it quite funny that diode bridge compressors, often noisy, tend to apply a very stupid sounding envelope to drums yet are worshipped by people on the internet for being expensive yet cheap, sometimes noisy compressors that apply an equally stupid envelope to drums are reviled.