If you’re old enough to remember the 1980s, you’ll recall it was a time when ‘digital’ became the cool, new thing. And not just in music production. Everything went digital, from clocks to watches, from cash tills to calculators. And in music making we got the skips in to take our compressors and great big modular synths away! In came digital synths, computers, hard disc recording and endless ones and zeros. Forget those silly knobs and dials kids – we had endless menus to step through and could now record in binary! Forget tape, hiss, noise and wobble – clean audio perfection was just round the corner!
How fashions change. Somewhere along the march of digital, we decided that it was a bit too clean and harsh. And now, of course, analogue is back! Modular synths – many analogue, right? And now you can use your DAWs to combine digital clarity with analogue charm, realism and punch, and that’s what we’ll show you in this month’s cover feature. We’ll explain just what ‘that analogue sound’ is, and reveal some easy techniques to add the right amount of it to your mixes. We’ll show you how to use the best analogue-style plugins, and how classic mixing methodology can help get the most from them. Best of all we’ll do most of it using plugins you already have by way of the mighty Plugin Suite.
