Plec
Master of Ceremonies
There are great things with both analogue and digital. There are just a couple of things with digital that really misses the mark for me when doing most of the things I do.
1. All them nasty and pretty useless transients.
Transients are of course a critical part of a sound, but when doing hard hitting music that's supposed to sound compressed and thick I feel that digital overemphasises the transients. The irony is that digital always focuses on getting the top 10db of a sound in such super focus that it neglects the rest of the sound. The top 10db of an acoustic snare for example is all transient energy and no meat. If you then have a very dynamic digital mix with healthy transients, you then murder them in mastering with limiting and the likes by maybe 6db, and then you have actually removed the part that digital focuses on the most. The lower in level you place a sound in a mix with digital, the more distorted it's going to sound since the main focus of digital is getting the loud stuff super clear.
The difference with analogue is that it just can't handle that peak energy that digital can, and that's often a good thing since you really want the meat from the sound and not the 2-3ms transients that more or less tends to put the resonance of the instrument out of focus and that transient is probably going to be removed later in mastering anyway.
Now, you probably are thinking something like "Hey... why not use limiting??". But that's not really how it works since limiting is really superfast compression that punches small holes in the sounds instead of just integrating the transients, so analogue clipping is the key to getting the meat, and it has do be done before any digital conversion so you get that resonance and meat from the instrument somewhere in that top 10db range of the dynamics.
That's just my .02
1. All them nasty and pretty useless transients.
Transients are of course a critical part of a sound, but when doing hard hitting music that's supposed to sound compressed and thick I feel that digital overemphasises the transients. The irony is that digital always focuses on getting the top 10db of a sound in such super focus that it neglects the rest of the sound. The top 10db of an acoustic snare for example is all transient energy and no meat. If you then have a very dynamic digital mix with healthy transients, you then murder them in mastering with limiting and the likes by maybe 6db, and then you have actually removed the part that digital focuses on the most. The lower in level you place a sound in a mix with digital, the more distorted it's going to sound since the main focus of digital is getting the loud stuff super clear.
The difference with analogue is that it just can't handle that peak energy that digital can, and that's often a good thing since you really want the meat from the sound and not the 2-3ms transients that more or less tends to put the resonance of the instrument out of focus and that transient is probably going to be removed later in mastering anyway.
Now, you probably are thinking something like "Hey... why not use limiting??". But that's not really how it works since limiting is really superfast compression that punches small holes in the sounds instead of just integrating the transients, so analogue clipping is the key to getting the meat, and it has do be done before any digital conversion so you get that resonance and meat from the instrument somewhere in that top 10db range of the dynamics.
That's just my .02
(their level becoming higher and lower with the fade of the toms) any tips on that?
