Toolkit: Tape Emulators

This month we remind ourselves why tape remains so popular and explore its mix-enhancing capabilities

If ever you needed evidence of the saying ‘be careful what you wish for’, the relentless drive to the purity and clarity of transparent digital recording offers plenty. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, engineers were resigned to the inevitable hiss of spinning tape as recordings were made, as they dreamt of a day when ample digital storage and high sample rates would align to produce a noise-free digital alternative. And when computer-based recording arrived, we rejoiced. But, many years later, tape emulation plugins are all the rage, and plenty of recording studios have had to dust off their tape machines to ready them for a new generation of artists. This month, we’re diving headlong into this subject.

Tape is, by its very nature, inherently noisy, so why would we go out of our way to dial that into our tunes? And what exactly is it about tape that makes it sound the way it does? Why do input signals sound different when they’re recorded at low level compared to when they’re driven closer to the volume at which tape signals distort?

A huge part of why tape sounds the way it does is due the mechanics of tape machines themselves. The motors that propel tape are, of course, designed to run as smoothly as possible, but no machine is perfect and the tiny irregularities here contributed to tiny variations in pitch, resulting in ‘micro-varispeed’. More significantly, however, the hotter you print a signal to tape, the more harmonic content you create. As with any distortion effect, if you really overcook a signal and record far too loud, the distortion is unpleasant and unmusical but in the ‘soft clipping zone’ of tape, hot signals fuzz beautifully. Add in some subtle phasing, the artefacts of old and overused tape, and the compounding of these ‘issues’ when bouncing tracks to another tape machine at the mixdown. and you can well understand how tape made its sonic presence felt.

So popular has tape saturation become that a wide range of plugin developers now offer tape emulators, all of which vary in their levels of ‘realism’ and willful, creative warping of tape effects at their more extreme end. Through the tips and techniques in this month’s Toolkit, we’re exploring a number of different areas in this field. In one walkthrough, we’re seeing how we can create ‘fake’ tape hiss and get this to integrate into a track through some dynamic modulation. In our longer walkthrough, we’ll look at parallel treatments of tape saturation effects, looking to create bespoke, appropriate treatments for the individual elements within a track. As ever, once you’ve understood the creative opportunities afforded by tape emulators, don’t be afraid to warp them to the requirements of your own tracks. And lastly, don’t forget to check out this month’s video too.