Old sound New singer

[Rachelle Productions]

Hi there

probably been covered but what is the best pre to get those old sounding vocal tones where breakup and distortion was used to get the vocal sitting, ALA Aretha Franklin, Mommas and Papas ect, and a million other hits from the 60s.

cheers
Mark

ps SSL day tomo!

[Kurt]

Any modern clean pre followed by a tape saturation plugin?

[gigpiglet]

yes i was going to say record to tape!
have you tried the neve portico hardware tape emulator? they have a certain "something" that sounds proper. try borrow one?
also - roll off a lot of bottom end from whatever you use.
nothing used to have the bumpy bass that everything seems to now

[Drumstruck]

shameless plug.... you need my Elcom Germanium pre

[Chris H]

I was also going to say a germanium preamp but with using the pre to get this sound you are committed at the tracking stage so i would split the signal and also record clean. My older silver optro's arnt germanium, (as far as I know ) and distort smoothly for this and ive used them with my old STC ribbon to get this sound going but the newer 7500 optros just crackle and snap sounding nasty when pushed. I find other plugins and methods much better than tape saturation for this, as well as sometimes using a mic other than the typical vox condenser type. Driving the right compressor into distortion on a parallel buss and adding to the clean vox while mixing is my preferred way.

[The Tasmanian]

IMO: (Ive done a heap of albums like this)
Ribbon mic interacting with overloaded mic pre + EQ.
The secret is in driving the preamp - which a lot of preamps in those days had large gain steps - 10db, so they were running into saturation/distortion/input transformer overload on the bigger notes.
Plus the transformer compresses during input overload (Electrodynes and QuadEights do this really well)
The mic+overloaded pre+EQ need to be cooked together to get the sound.
The EQ pulls focus and lifts the frequencies where you want the voice to shine.

Also - I find its pointless attempting to do it in the mix - the setup needs to be cooked with the right gain, then fed into the singers headphones so that they are reacting to the sound live. When they dig in, they can hear the preamp overloading and respond to the sound by controlling their performance volume to get the preamp to overload on certain notes - just like a guitarist with an amp braking up when hard notes are struck.

have fun!
(PS - forget plugins: don"t even go there)

[Engininja]

What The Tasmanian said.
Commit. Hit it hard. Whatever you use.
Hit hard. Don't be shy. Be bold. Fearless. Commit.

funken
ampex
electrodyne
rola
neve
shure
even api.

whatever.
hit hard.

[a.d.a.m. baby]

Driving the right compressor into distortion on a parallel buss and adding to the clean vox while mixing is my preferred way.

Do you mean driving the sidechain or the audio path of the compressor? (I've been messing around a lot with parallel processing - distortion, EQ, compression - powerful stuff)

Also - I find its pointless attempting to do it in the mix - the setup needs to be cooked with the right gain, then fed into the singers headphones so that they are reacting to the sound live. When they dig in, they can hear the preamp overloading and respond to the sound by controlling their performance volume to get the preamp to overload on certain notes - just like a guitarist with an amp braking up when hard notes are struck.

As a sometime singer, this makes sense to me. What you hear in the cans has a huge immediate effect, but...

(PS - forget plugins: don"t even go there)

... for those of us without expensive pres and mics, I wonder what a good compromise would be between these two approaches?
I mean, to give the singer the type of auditory feedback the Tasmanian is talking about to optimise the performance, but then be able to use Chris Hallam's approach in the mix?

[The Tasmanian]

Hey Adam - an elcheapo ribbon will be fine with a preamp that has click gain stepped pots.
A lot of modern mic pre's with variable pot gain sound crappy driven too hard.
Then, some modern re makes of classic pre's are great - like the VP28 (API copy) which is set up to be easily driven with an output line amp stage, and they sound sensational for this job, and drums/guits/bass etc (around $600)
IMO - the preamp driving is the secret.

EQ - could be nothing special too - as little should be needed.
Although - I do find inductor EQ always gets me better results in this context, they seem to go into overdrive with the pre-amp and act together to make really nice harmonic distortion/breakup.
I'm not a fan of the parallel comp/distortion approach for this particular application.

[Chris H]

Driving the right compressor into distortion on a parallel buss and adding to the clean vox while mixing is my preferred way.

Do you mean driving the sidechain or the audio path of the compressor? (I've been messing around a lot with parallel processing - distortion, EQ, compression - powerful stuff)

Also - I find its pointless attempting to do it in the mix - the setup needs to be cooked with the right gain, then fed into the singers headphones so that they are reacting to the sound live. When they dig in, they can hear the preamp overloading and respond to the sound by controlling their performance volume to get the preamp to overload on certain notes - just like a guitarist with an amp braking up when hard notes are struck.

As a sometime singer, this makes sense to me. What you hear in the cans has a huge immediate effect, but...

(PS - forget plugins: don"t even go there)

... for those of us without expensive pres and mics, I wonder what a good compromise would be between these two approaches?
I mean, to give the singer the type of auditory feedback the Tasmanian is talking about to optimise the performance, but then be able to use Chris Hallam's approach in the mix?

Driving the right compressor into distortion on a parallel buss and adding to the clean vox while mixing is my preferred way.

Do you mean driving the sidechain or the audio path of the compressor? (I've been messing around a lot with parallel processing - distortion, EQ, compression - powerful stuff)

I just gain up the input of my comp to give the sound i want and then set the threshold , attack release etc, i mix the original vox so its a touch low in the mix, then bring up the bus that has the comp on insert till it adds enough to sit the vox in the mix at the required level. All other parameters are adjustable eg you can have little or no compression or really hard compression and mess with the ratio of clean vox to distorted vox, whatever. I also use the approach Chris T favors and think it's probably better suited for recreating the "vintage" style especialy without in your face compression while the parallel comp way is great for a modern sounding take on things. So mix and mash of both ways but as i said before, If driving my silver optros or AWA germanium pre's for this while tracking, I always split the signal and also record through a non overdriven pre on another track to avoid the painful situation of the singer capturing her best performance but later not liking the driven sound. Once bitten twice shy on that regard.

[Rachelle Productions]

Thanks all for your comments

seems I need a Germanium Pre!

[gigpiglet]

yes. of course you need more gear!

[Chris H]

More gear, more gear
All I want is more gear
More gear, more gear
All I want is more gear, more gear

When I get home from work and I'm searching for that sound
All I want is more gear
I run into the studio and I tear off my shirt
All I want is more gear
Arm up the eight track I'll be using it first
All I want is more gear
I can plug in a mic faster than you
All I want is more gear
Gonna track a song or maybe two
All I want is more gear
If there was no more gear then what would we do
All I want is more gear

More gear, more gear
All I want is more gear
More gear, more gear
All I want is more gear, more gear

All I want is more gear
All I want is more gear
All I want is more gear

All I want is more gear
All I want is more gear
All I want is more gear

And when I wake up in the morning
My gear's all warm and ready, warm and ready
And I crawl to the studio
And I peek inside
And I feel like somebody drove XLR's
Into my head and eyes
And I'm hoping and I'm praying
I hope there's some more gear

More gear , more gear
More gear , more gear
More gear , more gear
More gear , more gear
More gear , more gear
More gear , more gear
More gear , more gear

Sung to the tune of Lee Ving's - More Beer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnF1HjglidM