Making Your Digital Mix Sound Analog with Brian Deck 

I record into a vintage computer hard drive, upload everything to icloud, let it sit a few days so it gets some mojo and then download it and start mixing on my old laptop for that old sound

Lots of comments here complaining about the UAD plugins. I just want to say that the concepts demonstrated in this video can be applied in all of your mixes with the plugins you already own. For example: instead of the UAD Neve line amp, you can use the Soundtoys Radiator, Kazrog True Iron, or the Waves NLS summing plugin. (basically, a saturation plugin). Many different plugin companies make the same analog modeled plugins that UAD does. The big takeaway from this video is setting up your DAW to have a signal flow that replicates an analog console, and using plugins to replicate channel saturation, summing, and analog processors. Concept over construct!

Thanks a lot, son of Butch Vig and Adam Savage. Really interesting!

Great video, Brian. Thanks for taking the time to share these mixing tips.

Thank you for this upload. Excellent and effective demonstration of these pre amp plugins. I especially appreciate how thoughtful your approach is in these mixes.

im surprised he didnt mention a tape sim! nice sounds all around guys!

Yo this is super helpful. Keep up the great content guys.

On the whole, his approach and what he's saying is solid. Pretty useless for people who don't know how to mix yet, but amazing for those of us who just want to add some extra colour and tone to our mixes. After a certain level it's definitely ALL about the gear, doesn't matter what anyone says, all pro's love expensive gear, it sounds amazing and makes the process so much easier. I got a lot from this and started using the UAD Neve preamp (which I never even knew I had) as well as some other UAD console emulations on the busses, which has definitely given me some nice high mid detail and more of that sought after colour and tone that 100% makes digital sounding mixes more 'Analog' Cheers Brian!.

Super informative! Thank you so much for this

Just made me nostalgic from when I used all analog hardware. I miss having my grease pencil, tape splices hanging around my neck and mixing with actual racks of tube EQs ...... Pultecs and 1176’s and Harmonizers Oh My!!! and of course my EMT plate reverb.

cool tune!!!

great video

Hey everyone, MORITAT is featured but the credits never happened. www.moritatmusic.com & www.moritat.bandcamp.com for more about us. new album, "Vermilion", TBR 2021. Thank you.

Califone love! Also, good info here, thanks!

Wonderful!!

Superhero again))) analog processed sound and sound in the box are absolutely different.

I've been doing this for a while. I built a 6SN7GT tube preamp complete with tube distortion and selectable 'age' (noise, etc.) Also, I'm developing the heart and soul of these gain stages, a digital transformer in /.out complete with the all important transformer phase shift. Every channel gets these preamps and line amps. Writing my own plugins guarantees what's inside 'em. I like to know what I'm working with. Bill P.

Great tips all around! I've been wondering how to get that fat kick sound the second track has at 12:50 - also has such a long decay, is it natural reverb thats going on?

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If you have the computing capacity to do the faux summing thing with Acustica plug-ins it gives freaky results. (Coffee, Camel, Sand, Pink are all optimized to do this actually)

Some lovely flangers on the guitars - did the band use an Electro Harmonix Electric Mistress / Filter Matrix pedal? Would love to know how they created those tones if it was some other flanger. :)

God, these comments are reductive. Yes, he's using cumulatively expensive hardware emulation plugins, but the overall point still stands when using stock compressors, eqs, saturators, etc.: emulate the signal paths of analog gear for a more cohesive sound. Stock plugins might be difficult to get sounding like Neve gear or the like, but the approach might improve your mixes.

I have an Apollo twin x Quad core interface and I am thinking to buy Burl B2 ADC. Should I need to buy apollo x8 before that ?

Brian Deck is the fucking man.

Great, thanks for that. But please, can you run for us your Rupert Neve 5088 console there? 🙃😬

All the big brand names there.

What are they putting in the Chicago weed? These song examples are so strange 😂

Send all your tracks throw an eq->a tube di->Burl preamp .... then they won’t sound like plastic ... use the eq to coerce the best tone with the tube inducing some 2nd order harmonics ... then overdrive slightly the transformer preamp to shave off transients and cause hysteresis to occur .... then you’ll be how much easier it will be to gain cohesion with in the box plug ins

Airwindows Channel 7 for open source plugin fans 👌

Lindell series 80 would be the best alternative to using the high cpu Uad neve preamps

Thanks for the concepts. Love all the commenters summing it all up as just buying plugins. Pearls before swine.

What do people think of the waves line up of plug ins called the 'abbey road' series - I use some of them and they are pretty good imo. any other thoughts about whether they emulate analog sound accurately? not looking for random unhelpful comments on the waves 'subscription' controversy though.

Do the weekend on synth sounds mane

I don’t have uad plugins so I can’t get that sound.

What about tape noise

Expensive plugins. There ya go.

If you want it to sound analogue...record analogue. There are plenty of good desks out there that don't cost the earth. Tape is still a thing and it's still wonderful.

Yay Red red meat 🥩🥰

He was great in Mad Men. That fake mustache doesn't fool anyone

hmmmm reamp the entire mix through a tape machine? i mean, cuz that music is pretty decent nstuff.

You're saying if I want an analog sounding mix, use plugins that emulate analog gear... wow! I'm so glad you guys were the first to think of this, congratulations.

Add distortion, screw up your frequency response, add noise, am I on the right track?

I agree, louder is better.

the guitar bit is annoying coz its not gain matched

Did UAD pay for this?

What program is he usin on the pc?

Hm, a professional mixing engineer using professional mixing engineer plugins. Imagine that.

A daw can't reproduce a analog mixer and or tape machine. This demonstrates it nicely. At no point I thought to myself that this sounds analog. Quite the contrary I thought to myself all the time: THIS SOUNDS DIGITAL. Where is the randomness? Where is the noise? Where is the saturation? Where is the character? Where is the wobble? I simply only hear that digital clarity that I don't like...

Is this a UAD ad?

maybe she will too

Early birds catch the worm

The song is still sounds digital and muddled. Why do engineers overuse processing so much? Music is so fatiguing to hear nowadays. Why not just record like the old days and add as little effect as possible?

Just a rant... ITB since 98'...never had 100k to spend on recording gear. Spent my life as a club, and session musician. I have dozens of dx and vst compressors, been "bussing" tracks "forever", and have a 24 track mindset. LESS is always MORE. I've tried to watch these MWM videos with an open mind, but ... a guy with 100 grand worth of studio is NOT the guy with a laptop and headphones in his bedroom. Concepts are useful if you use UAD... with Mac, and Protools... or... if you don't... And I don't... but I know whatever I do on my old Truth2 monitors sound like god when played back through a set of Genlec. Your ears are the best tools. Nothing like someone using tens of thousands of dollars of gear, trying to bring analog excitement to lifeless tracks. Rather listen to Glenn Fricker... mere mortals can afford the plugins he uses, not these cpu cycle sucking ilok protected bloatware. All of these concepts can be accomplished w free vst, as easily as with the plugins he's sponsoring. I'm sure, through his 10k a piece monitors, he can hear the difference between his 1176 clone, and mine... the audience can't, and I'm betting neither can his clients. And since we're really just talking about compression with "color", why are we so stuck with sounds that were created/ captured on gear from the 70s? This is 2020...why do we care if it sounds like an SSL, or API, or.... insert any 70s piece of gear. It either sounds great, or... it doesn't. If it doesn't, the source is to blame, not your choice of compression. Throwing plugins at something does not make better tracks, and "glueing" together crappy tracks sounds like crappy tracks mixed well... and still... garbage. And... if these bands wanted analog, they should have used a portastudio... no comping tracks, mistakes and all... mix that, and then let's talk about mixing, or rather what he'd be really doing... fixing bad performances of lifeless material.

Plugins. The answer is plugins. The answer is always plugins on youtube.

No entiendo nada!! Subtitulos al español por favor!!!!!!! 🙏🏼

So moral of the story is to buy UA's Luna to get all these different plugins built in?

Step 1: leave a 60hz hum on your video

Calling autotune. Come in autotune ha

Super awesome video, but man the guitars in that song sound like a jumbled mess from a composition standpoint.

Sounds too much like a video that was sponsored by UAD

"Making Your Digital Mix Sound Analog to people who Listen in Digital Music Players or Streaming in low Quality" XD

Nothing interesting,just Universal Audio plugins AD

So the clown cannot define analog and digital sound. Thanks for the chuckles.

yeah i must be deaf there is nothing happening lol

Way too less saturation man

WTF is this song? 😂😂😂 wow

Too bad he doesn't know how to draw a signal path diagram. 🙄