Producer Brian Deck has made countless records with artists across the industry, like Iron & Wine, Fruit Bats, Modest Mouse, and many more. Deck has shared his recording knowledge with Reverb in the past, and today he's back with some more wisdom to share through another lesson. Today's topic: making your digital records sound analog.
"Now, what does it mean to sound analog?" Brian starts, before explaining what affects a signal path that's being fed into an analog mixer and how that translates to an "analog" sound. "This is going to have a homogenizing effect on the elements as they come together. They're all going to get the imposition of the same kind of sonic character from the same kind of input and line amps, and they're all going into summing amps, which are probably going to have a fairly similar character to the input amps."
To simulate this sort of sonic character when Deck is working digitally, he starts by creating separate busses for each instrument group—drum, bass, guitar, vocal, stereo, etc.—and placing a '70s-era line preamp at the first stage. This is just the beginning of Brian Deck's tips and tricks for mixing digitally with an analog vibe, so be sure to check out the full video above.