Rough it up a little

The best thing about digital audio recording is also the worst thing; it’s so freaking clean!

Combine that with the simple fact that fancy outboard gear to run our audio through on the way in is financially out of reach for a lot of home recordists, and it’s possible to end up with a situation where all of the tracks we’ve recorded — no matter how well thought-through and performed — can be just a little bit lacking in sonic interest.

So, when I’m working on a mix, I like to rough up the sounds a little bit! Here are some tools I like for that:

• Crappy tape emulations (e.g., SketchCassette)

• Pitch-destabilization plugins (my favorite, Pitch Drift, is free!)

• Weird lo-fi plugins (check out Super VHS)

• Distortion, either subtle or not so subtle (Decapitator is my favorite)

• Flangers / phasers (AudioDamage’s excellent PhaseTwo and QuatroMod are free, albeit legacy and unsupported [they work fine in my DAW])

• Preamp emulations (Fuse Audio Labs has some excellent ones)

“Can we make this less … boring?” — jamie