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Anyone know of any synths that are useful for recreating warm analog nostalgic sounds?
Im looking for something that sounds similar to the typical Boards of Canada synth

heres some audio if you aint familiar

Moogs, the Roland Juno 60, Yamaha CS-80 and DX-100, ... plus resampling (esp. 12-bit), chorus (esp. analog,) and tape saturation.

To get a nice warm sound on anything you can record your synths/drums/whatever to tape, then playback the tape and record it again in your DAW. You'll get a lush tape compressed sound, really warm sounding. Add a bit of reverb/eq before recording it to tape and you can get whatever result you'd like =)

what type of tape are you recording to?

The closest I have come to the Boards of Canada sound is running my Dot Com modular through my Chorus Echo Re501. Make it sound just like 1978 all over again.

aye, i believe BoC run their synths onto (and straight back off) an old tape machine, and the detuning is just a by-product of how old and fucked it is!

Any old Tascam or Fostex 4 track or 8 track. Something with variable pitch control would be best IMHO.

tape is overrated.

re501 isn't.

waldorf synths!

When I first got Massive, I made some massive patches - ran like 27% cpu on a high end quad core, but they had that boc fuzzy worbly sound. I later installed battery and it wiped out massive. Had to reinstall, and lost those patches. I spent a minute recreating one, and couldn't get there. I just know that sound is achievable in Massive.

Sharmaji wrote:tape is overrated.

Take off, eh!

Tape isnt overrated when you have a 1971 Mastering console that you got for 30 dollars at a goodwill. The Preamps are worth far more than just that on this Scully 280.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3 ... 1039296720

is it me or does Massive sound really thin most of the time? My Korg Legacy Plugs even sound fuller in tone.

The wow and flutter from the tape delay is a big part of it; outside of that, the synth color will play a part in it, but a basic VA synth that you're comfortable with should do the job...though I am using OSX right now, I really miss the Abakos synth from when I was using Windows, it's really nice at getting lovely warm timbres. I really like C64 type SID synths for warm timbres as well (although that is about as digital as you can get, ironically) -- on Windows again, I miss Odo's Unknown/Unknown 64 & Dreamer synths quite a bit. Hmmph. Guess I'm going to have to set up VirtualBox + WXP and/or wine + wineasio on my ubuntu partition, as there's so much incredible free music software on windows.

Wow and Flutter is exactly it.

I have used a real C64 for pads before, run that through a chorus echo and it sounds just mind blowing. My VA's didnt sound as good though, even though it was going through a premium analog device.

Architecture wrote:is it me or does Massive sound really thin most of the time?

It's u

Architecture wrote:Tape isnt overrated when you have a 1971 Mastering console that you got for 30 dollars at a goodwill. The Preamps are worth far more than just that on this Scully 280.

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3 ... 1039296720

is it me or does Massive sound really thin most of the time? My Korg Legacy Plugs even sound fuller in tone.

Unison is your friend

ianks wrote:what type of tape are you recording to?

Any tape will do mate, just make sure the tape deck is reasonably good because if it's shit you'll hear the recording slow down and speed up constantly ( i forget the tech name for this )

Massive sounds big if you havent heard a real analog in person. and I own plenty of analog.

I've got some decent sounds out of the Loomer Aspect VSTi.

Here's one of their blog pages about making a BoC synth line : http://blog.loomer.co.uk/2009/06/recrea ... ygbiv.html

i signed up just to tell you all this

if you are into using tapes for the aforementioned 'warming' do not overlook the mighty VHS tape... holy crap. you can crank the levels going into the tape recording too.. it may take a couple tries to get what you want, but its vicious/ an older tape/ones that been recorded on already may sound dirtier, a newer fresh blank tape will sound cleaner... but both will be heavy.

ps i read this trick on another message board and tried it both for samples and for mastering a 'lofi' track

dman5000 wrote:i signed up just to tell you all this

if you are into using tapes for the aforementioned 'warming' do not overlook the mighty VHS tape... holy crap. you can crank the levels going into the tape recording too.. it may take a couple tries to get what you want, but its vicious/ an older tape/ones that been recorded on already may sound dirtier, a newer fresh blank tape will sound cleaner... but both will be heavy.

ps i read this trick on another message board and tried it both for samples and for mastering a 'lofi' track

Cheers Dman. That is indeed a good trick, one that I'd forgotten about from my 4-track days...

In fact, Beta video tape is more or less exactly the same as DAT and were both proprietary Sony inventions - something not many people know - and cassette trackers used to bounce tracks down to Beta - or VHS (which has slightly lower quality/fidelity, but maybe that's a good thing here) - to free up room for more tracks.

HOWEVER:

Almost every single VCR ever made - either Betamax or VHS - has some compression built into the audio circuit so when you play back from the VCR you're getting the VCR's compression whether you like it or not. Different VCRs have different degrees and quality of compression. Again, this could be a good thing or a bad thing depending on what you're after.