Elusive 70s sound

[dazzjazz]

I was just listening to Jimmy McGriff’s Soul Sugar album. Gorgeous sound, especially the thudding electric bass sound. To my ears, the whole thing sounds like heavy tape compression to me. Is there a way to get this sound in my home studio?

[KuruPrionz]

Try a limiter followed by a tape machine emulation in the master section of your DAW. If you don't have a limiter plugin, a compressor set to a high ratio (20:1 or so) and a low threshold to trim down the peaks is also a limiter. It will take some time to get the compressor to limit in a great sounding way, don't make the attack time too short and keep the release time fairly short, you just want to bring down the initial transients. 

There are quite a few plugins that do tape machine emulation. IK Multimedia has an Ampex 2 track that I think sounds nice but there are lots of good ones out there. 

 

It could take some tweaking to get closer. Bear in mind for it to sound like the original record you'd need to record the music in a similar fashion as well, meaning room, microphones, instruments, etc. 

 

Doesn't mean it won't sound good if you do things differently, go ahead and give it a spin. 

[dazzjazz]

Okay will give it a shot but I understand it’s a confluence of factors. Thanks. 

[KuruPrionz]

I edge closer to things all the time working in my home studio. 

I rarely have an epiphany where suddenly, I am there. Hopefully we get other suggestions in this thread, I always learn something.

I'm HUGELY grateful for the incredible, affordable gear we can all have now!!!!

[Bill Heins]

70's- they worked at lower volumes, less extreme highs and lows, some saturation, and not as wide an image. The saturation from tube equipment gave the sound the warmth and the lack of excessive lows and highs glued the sound. Also less in your face instrument recordings and more creative use of delays and verb.

 

Those are my suggestions, take them with a grain of salt and an apple a day and let me know how you get on

 

Bill

[KuruPrionz]

21 minutes ago, Bill Heins said:

70's- they worked at lower volumes, less extreme highs and lows, some saturation, and not as wide an image. The saturation from tube equipment gave the sound the warmth and the lack of excessive lows and highs glued the sound. Also less in your face instrument recordings and more creative use of delays and verb.

 

Those are my suggestions, take them with a grain of salt and an apple a day and let me know how you get on

 

Bill

Good suggestions and intrinsic to the fact that the 70's was vinyl records as far as the public is concerned. 

They could not reproduce lower frequencies without the needle jumping the groove so yes, that is correct. 

Getting highs and lows out of the same groove is physically problematic as well - intermodulation distortion could begin to rear it's ugly head. 

 

By then, the strange stereo experiments where vocals were panned hard to one side and bass to the other were more or less over, I think that was mostly a phenomenon in pop music anyway. 

Jazz used more conservative recording methods for the most part and was often cut live. There are exceptions, some tracks on Bitches Brew by Miles Davis have one electric piano panned pretty far left and another piano panned pretty far right just for one. 

[dazzjazz]

Thanks everyone…will keep at it.