Sound processing ideas for a vinylesquer sound?

tsutek · Post by **tsutek** » Thu Mar 01, 2012 1:11 pm

Hi,

As I am suffering from bad case of scratch withdrawal syndrome (my deck broke down

waiting for a new one to arrive from mail order...), I thought it would be a good time to check into some sound processing techniques for obtaining a more vinylesque tone with using digital sound files and ms. pinky.

What I mean by "more vinylesque sound" is getting the grittier, dirtier sound of vinyl - the interplay of slightly worn record, stylus and pre.. And how that affects the scratching sound especially.

Let's hear your tips & tricks on sound processing! Do you prefer processing the audio files themselves or the audio output of ms. pinky to get your tone? What kind of processors do you use, plugins or hardware? Not asking anyone to reveal their exact parameter values or device models/settings, just some generalizations in the subject. Also interested in the physical/acoustic theory side of this, so any wisdom you have on this would also be appreciated.

Myself, I've had some quite nice results with bit depth reduction and tube distortion sim plugins, placed after ms. pinky audio output..

clement-meloscratch · Post by **clement-meloscratch** » Wed Mar 20, 2013 12:59 am

I think there are a lot of VST outthere capable of adding shit to your sound . click, hiss , hum etc etc ...

For example : http://www.izotope.com/products/audio/vinyl/

As of the psycho acoustic theory behind it , do you mean why do we love it ? It is just a cutural thing , it reminds us old times when we use to play interesting tunes, that's all .

play those hiss, hum etc .. to the bushmen in botswana and it will not remind them a shit

so there is no theory behind it .

But good question !

Did you find what you were looking since last year?

tsutek · Post by **tsutek** » Fri Mar 22, 2013 7:02 am

clement-meloscratch wrote: Did you find what you were looking since last year?

Well, so far I've had best experiences with the A800 UAD plugin.. does some pretty good "vinylesquing" IMHO!

But what do you mean "there is no theory"? There must be a lot of academic data out there about nonlinearities in audio devices, especially with all the "analog modelling" craze in the industry right now.. And hey I'm not trying to discuss adding nonlinearity to digital masters so that they'd sound "better" - I'm after the artefacts that are created when worn vinyl meets a worn needle meets scratching (a phenomenon that no doubt creates frequencies above 44kHz etc) - because IMO digital unaltered scratching sounds flat and lifeless!

discopatrick · Post by **discopatrick** » Tue May 05, 2015 3:32 pm

One request I've heard recently is to emulate this:

Apparently, the frequency range of a vinyl record changes as the needle gets closer to the middle. As we know, the middle of a record has a lower resolution than the edge, and apparently this results in a reduction in the higher frequencies.

In turn, this means that when you're in a mix, the incoming track is going to sound brighter than the outgoing track, and emphasises the fact that we have now moved on to the next track.

I haven't verified any of this myself, but it seems legit.

Mudo · Post by **Mudo** » Tue May 12, 2015 12:43 pm

To implement some grittier analog artifacts my bet (and searching) is going analog route directly putting some hardware fx after soundcard output to the mixer. Somekind of old tape recorder or even the same vinyl turntable (with doubled maybe triple output if you doubled it to have acces to regular vinyl in your set) some filtering to avoid "music" (timecode in this case) and kepp only the noise, crackle and so. It should return the "vinyl factor" to the music.

Hope it makes sense.

tsutek · Post by **tsutek** » Mon Aug 10, 2015 10:06 am

Yeah, I've been using a tube line amplifier sometimes as a post-processor, helps a bit. It injects a bit of "grainyness" into the resulting sound which I like, and also smooths out the high frequencies a bit.