tape-emulations ... do you need them?

[Ahornberg]

I grew up with music recorded on tapes. these days are gone ...

but there are tape-emulations like u-he satin ...

does anyone here use them, need them?

what are your experiences?

[seismic1]

I like them. I think I have used some form of tape emulation on all of my tracks and remixes from December 2012 until now. I started with FerricTDS from Variety Of Sound, which is free, and is a great plugin. Windows-only, I think.

Just over a year ago I bought Satin, and have used it on the Master Bus of every track I have worked on since then. I love the sound, but it's more CPU-hungry than FerricTDS (not an issue when only using a single instance on the master). It's also capable of more that just saturation, featuring delay and flanger modes suitable for channel FX processing.

I would recommend getting hold of FerricTDS and playing around with it.

[aoVI]

Use and abuse them often. J37 or Kramer Master Tape, usually paired up with some combo of Slate VCC/VBC/VMR. The more noise obscuring my playing, the better.

Demo'd Satin and liked it a lot, but have yet purchased it.

I could probably do without them, but the animations of the tape reels spinning makes me secretly giddy. :p

Quite certainly my 52 year old ears aren't worth the hair growing in them, But seriously--It seems to me even at subtle levels they seem to make a nice sound sound nicer. Not for every sound, but then nothing ever is.

[GaryG]

I've finally manned up to the fact that I don't have golden ears and struggle to appreciate subtleties like saturation. With plugslike ferricTDS and most 'flavoured' compressors I really only hear a difference when I push the controls to extremes. I do however appreciate 'gluing' stuff like drums together, running them through a common comp or eq or a hot filter (which guess is saturation... I like using a couple of fxexpansion freebies for this, cut down versions of Maul (CM and SE versions, both have features the other lacks).

[manducator]

I bought U-he Satin over a year ago and It's always in my mastering chain. I like the sound very much.

[Ahornberg]

Thank you all for your opinions.
I went on u-he Satin last week ...

[seismic1]

What do you think of it so far?

[windspace]

I use Satin on pretty much every song...or misuse perhaps. I am not familiar with tape saturation and have never tried another tape emulation plug-in. Due to CPU limitations, I mostly just use it on the master track, but a little bit seems to really add life to the sound.

[seismic1]

I recently started using some of the Desk Mode presets on individual synth channels. Play around with the tape speed and pre-emphasis and you can get some quite extreme harmonic effects. There are probably cheaper ways (in CPU terms) to achieve the same effect, but it floats my boat.

[Ahornberg]

What do you think of it so far?

Using Satin on the master channel, I think it makes the whole track more "stiff" or more like "on rails".
This goes hand in hand with a loss of stereo-width but that's ok for me.
The whole effect seems rather "esoteric".
I think I need more time to explore all the settings an parameters ...

[EggplantPurpleMoves]

I've finally manned up to the fact that I don't have golden ears and struggle to appreciate subtleties like saturation.

So glad to hear I'm not the only one who feels this way! I feel like I have to crank the settings up on some of my effects to the point of really colouring my sounds before I can appreciate the difference. I might just be that kind of person though because I don't notice subtle flavour changes with cooking either - gotta toss in lots of spices before I can find the difference.

That said I have found myself turning to FabFilter Saturn on the master or on individual synth or drum mixer channels for everything from full on mangling to more delicate saturation. Really enjoy this plugin.

[phoenstorm]

tape sims. use them and like them...for the more apparent stuff. satin is quite wonderful...don't forget the delay in there . Ferric (TDS)? is really great & free - if you're on 32bit windows.