THE ESSENTIAL GUIDE TO ANALOGUE DIRT

Your digital mixes may well be too perfect! Here's our guide to bringing some humanity back into your productions and how to get deep, down and dirty with some 'analogue' processing

If you’re old enough to remember the 1980s, you’ll recall it was a time when ‘digital’ became the cool, new thing. And not just in music production. Everything went digital, from clocks to watches, from cash tills to calculators. And in music making we got the skips in to take our compressors and great big modular synths away! In came digital synths, computers, hard disc recording and endless ones and zeros. Forget those silly knobs and dials kids – we had endless menus to step through and could now record in binary! Forget tape, hiss, noise and wobble – clean audio perfection was just round the corner!

How fashions change. Somewhere along the march of digital, we decided that it was a bit too clean and harsh. And now, of course, analogue is back! Modular synths – many analogue in nature – are all the rage and those digital, menu-driven synths of the 80s have been consigned to their deserved place in history. But we’re not just talking synths. The actual processing of sound also became too clean and clinical. We now yearn for vibe, warmth, presence and authenticity. But the analogue gear used to produce this – synths, vintage beatboxes, room-sized mixing consoles, and whirring tape machines – now cost an arm and a leg. Besides, we’re Computer Music, right?