Here's why "digital is sterile"... one man's opinion

The tools used are defective.

Let’s start, as open’s Fela Kuti’s Live with Ginger Baker, with EQ. Tonal issues stemming from the physical, I mean the mechanical, electrical is physical too, are issues of both phase and frequency. Standard minimum phase EQ filters work by shifting phase to change the frequency response. Thus you correct both the frequency response and the phase issues with a good eq to fix the mechanical tonal issue.

Unfortunately, cramped digital eqs correct neither the phase nor the frequency response of the high frequencies at single sample rates. The filters alias. Decramped, prewarped eqs, e.g. Oxford EQ, Renaissance EQ, Fabfilter Pro Q zero latency mode, correct the frequency response issues but often screw up the phase even more at single sample sample rates, i.e. 44.1 and 48 kHz. Post-warped by corrective fir filters will often greatly soften the sound in the audible range.

Of course the eqs that over sample going back to the Weiss EQ1, the MDWEQ, and the PSP MasterQ and SQuad have correct amplitude and phase like good low distortion analog eqs. Those were expensive. And the crappy or old opamp ones often have shifting frequency and phase when you get you be higher frequencies and the board and 500 series often have inaccurate and small pots.

Then you have the crappy dynamics, the smoothed dynamics that do not compress the entire audible range, the limiters that are basically downwards bit crushers. Then in analogue, you have the linear, not logarithmic, compressors that drastically over compress when you take off over a few vu and take the high end off because they cannot release quickly enough when triggered by the high frequencies.

a lot of this stuff wasn’t edited and punched into death. they could quantize drums and DIs pre computer with samplers. the bands were just that good. Eventually though, it starts to leave popular music as has been published since the 1800s and just gotten simpler over time behind to the point where it is incomprehensible to a normal person. Wishbone Ash and Van Halen are right on the cusp of “Too many notes” to quote Amadeus like a lot of classical music that isn’t program music is and isn’t really enjoyable by people who don’t play, aren’t musically educated, or just won’t give it their full, undivided attention. You cannot play it over an intercom at Wal-Mart like you can Sheryl Crow. Other progressive and fusion bands not really rooted in 50s and 60s rock, old school heavy metal, or hit people punk and death metal might as well be made by aliens and has only a loose, genre appeal to a casual fan. The crowd or whatever glorified bar band is opening for them are pretty much watching the work of an incomprehensible god. For metal, the later Iron Maiden, Death, and Emperor records have unbelievable musicianship and what they’re doing is amazing but and has zero appeal to someone who wants music to get drunk and mosh to or even just treat it as ambient wallpaper because it’s cleanly recorded without a lot of fx even if pushed too hard into a limiter for the mid 90s stuff onward and remasters.

When this comes up every so often I'm reminded how deep the parallels are to film production in the pre vs post digital era.

Albums that are naturalistic - just people in a room playing, not something like Tame Impala, Alabama Shakes or whatnot - those I'd rather hear done on tape. I think T Bone Burnett's records, especially True False Identity, are a good example of something pretty modern in how its compressed and expanded frequency wise but done analog (as far as I know?) in a way that I still think is quite hard to achieve in digital. I don't know if Gillian Welch and David Rawlings do anything on digital but my guess is something would be lost. I can't imagine hearing Folk Singer by Muddy Waters with even the best conversion of today. The sound of a medium you brush up against as you're pushing it...I guess you can get there with a plugin chain but again, I'm unconvinced.

I'll admit to not looking hard enough but I really haven't heard too many "people in a room" records that I thought were compelling in the past decade or so. I think this jazz record was done digital and I quite like it. Nothing amazing but I feel like it's a solid capture of a cool band:
shabakaandtheancestors.bandcamp.com/album/wisdom-of-elders

In general, I just feel like music adapts to a medium, as much as it exists outside of it. Even if it's just an acoustic band or player. For whatever reason, you're just going to make different decisions. Like working with a synth sequencer vs. mouse-clicking MIDI shouldn't be super different and yet it is.

And younger people use what's around them. The new folk instrument is the laptop, full-stop. It is the guitar of today and it makes complete sense that Phoebe Bridgers, Clairo, etc. have these hybrid elements in their songs. It's just a part of their world and trying to shoehorn it into a tape workflow would be missing the point (even if it could be interesting).

I feel it in film vs. digital and I think Gen Z can too. But it's about the statement you're trying to make and the vocabulary needed for that, as opposed to lights out qualitative differences. I think tape makes a lot of sense for a lot of bands, still. No plugin adequately gets it down.

In case you missed this thread/video, Rawlings stays analog basically as much as possible:


realgearonline.com/thread/17650/david-rawlings-interview-woodland-studio

Good post. I’ve actually used the Pulsar 78 in place of the AS HW…but usually, the 1178 handles things much more elegantly. Guess this song didn’t need elegance.

When I track at home by myself I will typically end up with several fake instruments…drums, anything keys, strings, B3. Maybe it has more to do with my playing…idk…but I always feel like those fall apart if you compared it to a version using real instruments.

I know people say, “fake drums are just recordings of real drums.” But I don’t seem to be able to get the same punch out of them. The dynamics - say in Superior Drummer - don’t respond the same. They mix differently than real drums IMO. I do supplement (sometimes replace) some real kicks and snares…and haven’t really with the SD songs…so maybe that’s one factor. Actually, it’s probably the cymbals/HH that’s the bigger giveaway. Same with B3. And fake amps. I just wonder if the sterility or whatever is compounded by the number of fake instruments you have on a tune.

I really want to try this as an experiment one day…hire out players but track at my place…that way I could finally put to rest whether the difference is mostly me or the equipment. My guess is great players probably make it A LOT harder to clock a difference.

I'm thinking of this while watching Lawrence Of Arabia and thinking of something like Dune (recent one).

I'm a bit late to the game on Lawrence of Arabia, having heard for years how amazing it was..  And I'm finding it boring, contrived, poorly/over acted and overall not anywhere near the hype.  Being a cinematography buff, I had read many times about the amazing cinematography and I was left severely wanting besides a few establishing shots of the desert.

Dune was utterly beautiful throughout.  A master class in photography, lighting and scene blocking.  The acting was sufficient and didn't get in the way of the movie.  The CGI was tasteful and added to the story rather than being the story like some of the dreadful summer blockbuster type movies.

Did digital somehow define the movie?  No, but in the right hangs it made everything much, much better.  

When a JANITOR hooks up a budget signal chain of course it will sound sterile. Instead use a superconverter such as ACOUSENCE (DE) and a quality mic. Always optimize the source. Have a specialist introduce you to great sound.
Abandon being a JANITOR.

That’s so many developers and gear manufacturers man. Then their users get online, defend the phasey, aliased, or misfiring compressor messes, attack anyone who criticizes them and points out their records would be better if they used something functional. The analog modeled channel strips are almost all awful. Maybe the uad api vision and the fuse tascam are the best ones because they don’t let the user defeat the processing quality and have good eqs. But of course you could always use a good eq…

Then there are all the recordings ruined by analog gear. Bad compression taking the top off, over 1176ed vocals on loud vocalists, spitty misfires, insane tape hiss on some recordings, eqs that run out of gain in the high frequencies and pretty much just distort, eqs totally off their markings, crazy hash and distortion from passing through some of these boards with tons of distortion just from transistors in switches, gear where merely inserting it led to noticeable detail loss (dbx and there is much worse gear than dbx), old vcas, constant under specced caps leading to phase shift and thin sound, ringing high end, insane noise that needs gating on silence and expansion! People act like everything analog was good, the eqs worked and were consistent and not subject to parts values and small pots, that gear didn’t need maintenance.

Sometime in the 2000s really there are really “analog” sounding recordings because they are piling up the crazy amounts of processing, overdriving everything, and using gear that is intentionally distorted like Empirical Labs, Drawmer 1960 series, starved plate tube equipment like ART, tube revival gear that is anything but clean, tube distortion boxes more distorted than old tube gear and seemingly based off of running stuff through tube guitar processors , solid state boxes more distorted than many guitar pedals, cartoonish clones of older equipment they’re able to get multiple channels of and stick on everything

And then in the 2010s you get the cartoonish digital distortion without artifacts starting with UAD2, Sound Toys, u-He, Klanghelm being ubiquitous, others pick up the pace like Softube adds in a lot more distortion with later versions of their plugins and after getting Weiss onboard seems to have made a huge leap in quality, the TDR stuff can be set to be mega distorted without digital artifacts, the Fuse and Black Rooster stuff can be pushed hard, Plugin Alliance has a lot of cool stuff, you are really able to do the 2000s analog grunge in digital. Yeah many of these things are slightly to totally dysfunctional (see stuff like DMG Trackcomp 2 where the mega pumpy API 2500 emulation and the whoa distorted zener are the best stuff in it) or all the bad 1176 emulations where you can just push the circuit without the compressor and it won’t alias but then why not just use a distortion plug?

Before digital distortion was very limited to wave shaping functions (inflator, phoenix and heat), weird clippers (vintage warmer), weird compressors (blockfish and mcdsp analog channel), and now the sky is the limit. Even with Decapitator at single sample rates you can filter out the distorted highs and use the mix knob to blend back in the clean highs. You don’t have to drive it into the red. Double sample rates clean it up a lot. Same with the multi band vintage warmer. New plugins from developers that give a shit about digital artifact mitigation you can push very hard but the awful Avid Lofi and CLA 76 are still abused all over pop music.

There’s not really a lot of difference unless you must have an 1176, an LA whatever (the maligned la4 used to be cheaper than plugs), a real ssl bus etc, need the api sound but really the need / want to turn knobs when tracking a whole band at once or punch it in to get it mostly done on the way in but then there’s the conundrum of what the artist wants to hear in their monitoring mix and what you do in the real mix is often different. Nobody wants to hear themselves drastically filtered or smashed. “You cut the low end of my amp!” then there’s the people too afraid to really use the gear and plugs to their fullest potential or they don’t know how to use it at all. If you don’t know how to use it all, using the fully functional real thing or the semi-functional emulations and clones won’t really matter and you probably shouldn’t be using it at all. Tons of musicians and producers have this problem and won’t just pay someone else a couple hundred bucks to mix down their song without unrealistic expectations.

Danny, what is the main genre you produce in?