Getting that Old-School sound (or not)

[cale w]

Oh elder gods of the TOMB, bestow upon me your trove of infinite wisdom...

I bit off more than I can chew (or stomach) when I told my ska band I can record us and get that 60's Studio One ska sound. In Protools. I wimped out and multitracked everything for super-clean for safety. I'm taking many attempts at mixing "down" to lo-fi sounds, but the constant feedback is that everything is still too clean. And I agree! I explain that the limitations of digital pretty much precludes getting that same super-saturated, bandwidth-limited, questionable mix quality tone of legit 60's Island recordings, and no amount of "run the mix through some tubes!" or "print it to cassette tape!" is going to get us any closer.

Also, after years of dedicating all of my practice towards improving sounds, I find it near impossible to allow myself to purposefully reduce sonic clarity. Like, you literally can't hear the drums on some of that old, super-vibey (incredibly awesome) ska. I feel like I'm kicking a puppy when I mix that way -it just hurts and goes against everything I know and trust!

Anyway, I want to make the band (and myself) happy. I don't think I'd want to start over and retrack everything all at once, minimal mics. I've tried that before and it just sounds like a rushed demo, again, not the sound we're going for.

I guess it's the age-old conundrum of the limitations of particular platforms, and comparing apples to oranges. But if ya'll got any advice, I'm all ears! Thanks.

Here is a snippet of a mix of mine that is close: https://soundcloud.com/calewilcox/tighten-up-snippet

[kslight]

I don't know, I think some well thought out EQ, compression and distortion could go a long way?

I also think that mixing to match another mix, whether inferior or superior sonically, is a more valuable skill than you're giving it credit for.

Don't give up, but I agree with your band, it is a bit on the clean side still..

[Judas Jetski]

I'm not sure I'd consider myself an elder god of anything... well, elder maybe, but that other part--not so much...

But the first thing that popped into my head was this: why not get a decent mix, dump it to cassette, play it through a sh*tty boom box, mic the boom-box with an ugly, stone-axe-reliable mic (EV 635a comes to mind), and run that in parallel with your clean mix? That way you could fade in just the right amount of "yuck" (or just the right amount of "clean" if that's how you roll). You'd still have the original mix, so you wouldn't be doing anything you couldn't undo later.

Might want to try this "lo-fi reamping" with a single mic, b/c running a mono signal up the middle might glue things together better than a stereo signal would.

[vvv]

+1 on the re-amp; I'd suggest just blasting your monitors (especially Auratones, etc.) and recording a mono track from in front, or behind, or in the hall or bathroom ...

Or you might re-amp thru a guitar amp for some bandwidth restriction and bring it back in parallel.

(Really just variations on what Mr. Jetski suggested.)

[jgimbel]

I come from a similar struggle working for years to finally be able to get nice, natural, clean sounds, only to have a lot of situations where it's too clean and I wish I could learn some things from where I was a few years ago. Personally I like to study a sound I'm kind of trying to aim for, or at least use part of, and pick out what is actually going on that makes it sound a certain way. Personally I notice drum sounds controlling the genre and perceived age more than anything, along with vocals, followed by bass and then guitar.

There are a few things that are where I generally start with this kind of situation, which happens relatively often. For one, distortion. My personal favorite for this situation is the utilitarian "distortion" plugin that comes with the DAW I use, Cubase. It has an output level, a "boost" level (basically input and distortion as one control) and a tone knob. The distortion isn't a smooth sweet kind of thing, it's actually pretty fuzzy at high levels. I'll often go a little more than light on the distortion and roll back the tone so the fuzzy frequencies sit back a bit. I do this a lot on many different instruments and it has a great knack for making things sound like a bit of a different fidelity without sounding like it just has distortion on it. You'd have to figure out what plugin would work best for you, I know not all plugins have a "tone" control like a guitar does, but maybe some combination of an EQ and a distortion could reach the same thing. I use this trick all the time. While it doesn't at all make things indistinguishable from tape, it is my way of giving many tracks a tiny bit of a saturation and leveling like one might get from tape. I don't think I can get an even slightly convincing vintage bass sound without having something like this on it. An added bonus of this technique is that the added harmonics let bass be clearer on smaller speakers.

Another thing that I'll go for is making the processing relatively simple. I don't know what kind of micing options you've set up but maybe removing some mics from the mix could help. For vintage sounds I'm often using an overhead (or two if the kind of song requires it) and kick and snare. If the toms are a bit weak without close mics in there, that is often a good thing. Then process the drum group as a whole, if you need more weight to the toms boost those frequencies in the drums overall rather than bringing in tom mics. I notice that the drum sounds I've gotten in the past that had more in common with older drum sounds are from the days when I didn't know very much about how to use compression on drums, so I'd be leaving them pretty uncompressed, and then the peaks would get trimmed down in the master, which is where the sound really comes together for that type of drum sound. It will sound a little weak while you're doing it, but to me that's a bit part of older drum sounds, it's a mix of being a bit weak but also being leveled out. Just not leveled out by the way we often do it where you're hitting it hard with compression. What I often try to do in more modern rock mixes is to try to knock down some of the transients while spreading the sound out a bit, if that makes sense. Compression with medium-fast releases so the snare has a bit of a "ksshh" tail to it. Well I find that to not be present in older drum sounds. Things sound very dry (not in that they don't have any room sound, sometimes they do sometimes they don't) but being very leveled out lets them be more just present for rhythm than for hearing every individual drum. Minimal compression and then minimal individual drum processing paired with some sort of leveling (I often using the rolled-back-tone-distortion trick I mentioned on drums) can be a huge help. A compressed snare and compressed kick don't sound as old to me as compressed full kit groups. You should be aiming to lessen some detail of each element, while leveling everything out individually makes it all have better separation - not the goal here, in my opinion.

One more thing is that I often notice midrange peaks in kind of strange places in older recordings that are counter intuitive. The elements in your mix sound very nicely balanced. Really clean, smooth high end but not overly present, existing but not massive low end. This is desirable for a lot of situations and is really nice in the recording, but it's just too balanced. If you were to, for example, boost 1.5k on the vocals, then going into a distortion, it would take away some of the perfect evenness. Give the bass some big low end but then also boost 400k for example. Right now everything is sitting in a very natural spot - give a Pultec-ish midrange bump to a bunch of elements in different spots. 400hz on bass, 900hz on drums, 1.5k on vocals, 800hz on guitar, etc. These are just examples but I think having things live in their own spots like that, in a somewhat unnatural but cool way, is key in some older mixes.

Watch your vocal reverbs too. More plates and springs, less beautifully-recorded rooms. The reverb on the vocals sounds too nice too me!

[The Scum]

EQ and distortion will definitely help.

Listening to your mix, some things I hear:

First, the bass is nailing it.

There's a lot in the stereo image, panned all across. Consider simplifying that. Pan things either center, or hard one way or the other.

Think about how you might have tracked things if you only had 4 or 8 tracks, and how those tracks would have shown up on single faders on the console.

Consider the horns as one single unit, as if they were one mic to one track.

Same for the vox...or maybe lead in the center, backups hard L and R.

Consider the drums and bass another mono unit, straight up the center.

Then organ and guitar make one last unit. Let them cover up the hihat.

Try compressing things as groups to add some cohesion.

A touch of distortion (not outright fuzz, just enough that you notice the difference when bypassed), then hipass and lowpass on anything that's too clear. Try 120 Hz hipass, and 7K lowpass...at 6 or 12 dB per octave, nothing super steep. Perhaps on each above group separately.

Old gear, especially tape machines, didn't have super lo and hi band capabilities...it wasn't "flat from 20 to 20K." But it wasn't super reduced either...it gradually fell away. Turn the hipass up until you notice that you've lost a little something, then leave it there. Repeat for the lowpass.

A/B-ing mixes is also useful...being able to push a button, and cut from yours to something that you're aiming for sonically is really valuable. It's really easy to know the low, highs or reverb aren't right if you can pop between two mixes, and notice how they compare. But it only works for me if the switch is instantaneous...I've got a groovy old CD player with a "loop" function, so I can cue up a reference and let it roll, and it automatically rewinds for me.

There are some performance aspects that have changed on the interceding years, and some things that a studied musician does that nobody in Jamaica did. If you really want to sound rootsy, these are things to consider.

Your singers have really strong breath support and sustain.

The drums are also anachronistic...very crisp, modern sounding cymbals and resonant toms, and some really busy fills.

There's some cool Carlton Barrett info at the link below. There are some snippets of solo drums, which certainly aren't hifi.

http://midnightraverblog.com/tag/barrett-brothers/

Try single headed toms, with some tape of felt to muffle them. Single headed kick, with a single ply coated head and a pillow inside. Thinner, darker, dirtier cymbals. Crash cymbal at the start of the fill, rather than the end, if it's used at all.

[Gregg Juke]

Double-Post self-deleted...

GJ

[Gregg Juke]

All awesome suggestions and +1,000 to all of the above. There's a _lot_ that you can done to "lo-fi" a mix, and A/Bing can take you a long way.

One caveat/caution-- I know that you think you want your stuff to sound just like early Studio One, but I've recently been re-listening to both early Wailers and non-Bob Studio One and other Jamaican sessions; too much band-limiting, overblown, distorted bass, non-existent drums, tape distortion and smearing, and analog tape-echo dirt might make your record sound a lot less cool, and a lot more "how could they record something so crappy in this day and age?"-ish. Just sayin'; a lot of what we perceive as quaintly awesome is chronologically dependent, and would just sound out of place on a modern recording. You want to evoke and emulate some of that sound, not copy it (which is why I love the "parallel-cheese" concept, henceforth known as the Jetski Doctrine).

GJ

[MoreSpaceEcho]

the parallel cheese concept is a good one, except that as described in Jetski's post, it won't work. there's gonna be variations in the playback speed from the cassette deck, and it'll phase like crazy against the original if you try to run it in parallel. if you wanted to be an insane person you could go in and cut up the parallel cheese track every 10 seconds or so and slide the bits around to try and keep everything in phase, but this is way too much work for too little gain, IMO.

also, you know that on the old ska records you're trying to emulate, they weren't doing any kind of parallel anything, so this is probably not the way to go for this record.

everything the scum posted sounds pretty right on to me. i would import a couple tracks into your sessions so you can a/b your mixes against theirs. and use this project as an excuse to do some different stuff/learn new things...

so, even though:

after years of dedicating all of my practice towards improving sounds, I find it near impossible to allow myself to purposefully reduce sonic clarity

in this case, you ALREADY KNOW that this is what you have to do, so just embrace it. the next 10 records you do can be all shiny and super hifi. do something different on this one.

switch back and forth between an old ska tune and your mix, and just keep hammering at yours until it gets closer. don't worry about where any of the eq's are at, it doesn't matter if you're lowpassing the drums at 2k if it sounds right.

i'd be inclined towards a lot of subtle/gentle distortion on everything. and maybe more obvious distortion on a few things. tubes might help, tape and transformers would definitely help. if you're all ITB, maybe look into saturation plugs....experiment with putting the eq before or after it.

[vvv]

Also, and not sure, but isn't a lot of that stuff panned L-C-R?

[A.David.MacKinnon]

Also, and not sure, but isn't a lot of that stuff panned L-C-R?

A lot of that stuff is panned center ie: mono

[vvv]

Also, and not sure, but isn't a lot of that stuff panned L-C-R?

A lot of that stuff is panned center ie: mono

Izzat what that's called?

But then I always loved this, what sounds fairly panned in places, and not much lo-fi. But the drums are, mebbe, subtly.

[Gregg Juke]

But surely some phasing is a desired effect and necessary evil when applying the Jetski Doctrine?

GJ

[vvv]

Seems to me the phasing needs to be set to stun.

[ott0bot]

if you really want "that" sound you have to retrack with less mics, lots of submixing, fewer tracks, to tape. you'll have to have a great band vibe, an some real dancehall songs.

but personally, I have to agree. mixing like that on purpose would be difficult, because you can make it sound so much better now. the other suggestions given: re-amping, eq, distortion, etc...will get you closer.

ask your band, so you want a good record or a parady. maybe they'll see why going "old skool" may be difficult, unless you actually record that way.