Deliberate lo-fi? How would you do it?

thanks. i always try to record as much sound as my vision. so i mainly choosed dynamic or ribbon mics through neve preamps with a bit of compression on. the instruments used are the most important sound. but yeah, during mixing the sound gets mangled a lot more.

All these posts talking about special plugins and preamps and effects and whatnot..

Just LPF everything a lot lower than you would normally do and HPF everything higher than you'd normally do. Then don't treat the low mid bloom on anything. Compress heavily.

Ok. Cool sound but I wouldn't call it lo-fi.

As others have said it's a lot of LPF, dry drums, sparse and careful arrangement. That's the JJ Cale vibe, lots of exemples.

I've been doing some recordings with an RE-11 from the 70s, and it definitely has a built-in lo-fi/vintage charm. I'm going to guess it's partially the age of the mic and partially the roll off in the highs that Bob has said was characteristic of the 10s and 11s compared to the 15s and 16s.

But Toupee on Hair Metal.
Chris

keep everything simple, probably minimal mic'ing on drums as well (3 or 4 mics maybe, not 20 mics...) and don't be fooled by a video that shows a specific mic .  Unless that is live concert footage, it might not be the same mic that they used to record (as they used for the lip-sync video... videographers love props)

Okay, I wanted to tackle this more in depth. My years of devouring written information and listening to the greats talk about recording back then has given me enough insight to make a list of what “makes” a 60s hi-fi pop record. If I’m wrong, please correct, all of this is 2nd hand from other people though much of it has been tested by me trying to reproduce the process digitally in the DAW age.

In no specific order:
Great rooms with pleasant ambiance.

Distance micing instruments and vocals in great rooms to balance sound and avoid spiky transients.

Tracking basics live in one room with bleed and ambiance. Some of those, like the “God Only Knows” bass or the “James Bond Theme” guitar bleeding into the surrounding mics and sounding huge are near impossible to reproduce artificially (in my experience).

“Clean” tube gear.

Vintage condensers and ribbon mics, although Brian Wilson recorded lead vocals on Shure 545s that don’t stand out too much from those on 47s. Bob has said that the resonances in modern mics are one of the biggest problems in trying to reproduce vintage vocals in particular.

Tape Heads, Tubes, Tape Bounces, and Tape Wear eating extended and high frequency transients.

A very lean low end. Very little below 100hz, maybe kick drum and bass, virtually nothing below 70. Most fundamentals are way down from micing farther away and/or shelving. Vocals are primarily 1st harmonic and above.

Mono drums with fewer mics.

Chamber, Plate, and Spring reverbs, usually mono. Gold Star had tape pre-delay, some of the other studios had the delay after a short chamber.

Lower dynamic range/Peak to Loudness ratio overall from micing techniques and having drums mixed lower. Probably reduced further by hardware during mastering/cutting. Some of those Byrds and Sunshine Pop records are craaaaazy squished without sounding like modern ear aches. Got to keep above that noise floor.

Very ear friendly high end. Many of those vocals into the late 60s, even the early 70s, start rolling off sharply after 5k, but its hard to make that sound natural with LPFs because the frequencies still extend in a psychoacoustic manner on the analog recordings. The “Sessions With Sinatra” book says that Sinatra was specifically “rolled off above 5k” on a Pultec during the 60s.

For certain sounds, less compression overall. I think that Gold Star only had one compressor for many years? That’s also not a fair modern comparison since tape was doing some of the work. [Added: and again, the records still aren’t modern punchy.]

Combining # 7 and 11, an overall RIAA friendly frequency curve and mixing for vinyl/AM radio rather than modern digital playback.

No midrange resonances. A lot of those old records are smoooooth.

That’s what I’ve got. I’ve found that modern imitations are pale at best without the tape, tubes, and rooms. Discuss!

Touche

You might try running the vocals back into your 1073 and overdriving it. Or, if you have any analog tape echos like a Space Echo or Echoplex/Fulltone TTE run the vocal into that without any delay. That's what the female vocal in your reference sounds like to me. A good plug-in for this the Safari Pedals Fox Echo Chorus because you can turn the delay off but still drive the input into distortion, and there's a blend. And maybe just a little delay and spring reverb for it will sound awesome. But there are tons of harmonic and distortion plugins and you've probably got a ton that'll work.