Over the years I’ve seen a lot of what analog type plugins can offer over stock plugins such as eq and compression, will ardour ever make a analog moddled version of the a-eq and a-comp, I do have mixbus but I am tired of paying for mixbus versions every year and I’m getting over the whole mixbus hype. I still like ardour as it works and I like it a bit more then mixbus sometimes. Also was wondering if there was any open source analog moddled plugins ardour can use for their a-eq and a-comp
The short answer, incredibly unlikely from Ardour.
I am curious, what defines ‘analog modeled’ to you though?
SeabladeWell I guess a plug-in that is moddled to behave and carry certain characteristics of a analog eq or compressor etc
This made me smile. This is another case where the analog errors sound nice and are desirable. I totally get why op wants this because as a guitar player I know that the errors in audio reproduction of the guitar sound are more desirable than correct reproduction of the sound 
Sometimes when mixing I hope the transient reproduction would to be less accurate than it is.
There are some analog saturation plugins, I haven’t much used these:
Tap tube warmth: http://tap-plugins.sourceforge.net/ladspa/tubewarmth.html
Invada plugins includes: Tube Distortion
Airwindows has a tape saturation plugin “ToTape”: http://www.airwindows.com/airwindows-linux/
Other users might know if there are exactly the type of plugins you want.
Thanks I’ll give Linux another spin as I plan to do more Linux work. Thanks
For my Mac OS and windows I have lots of analog plugins but I like the less proprietary system Of Linux and want to move away from most of it,
Not sure if this counts as “analog modeled,” but Robin Gareus’s parametric EQ is worth looking into: https://x42-plugins.com/x42/x42-eq. From the description: " x42-eq (aka fil4.lv2) is a 4 band parametric equalizer with additional low & high shelfing and high & low-pass filters. The equalizer is designed to match equivalent analog gain with zero latency and no phase-shift when approaching the Nyquist frequency. It does not have a cramped response which is often the referred to as digital sound."
I’ve been using this EQ in Ardour for quite a while and it’s excellent.
If “analog modeled” is more important than free/open source you can buy the OvertoneDSP’s whole Workstation-plugin collection for about third of what Mixbus 32C costs.
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You can probably find full versions of x42 plugins by searching your distros repo. Please consider supporting x42’s work if you find the plugins useful.
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I like open source free software but sometimes for the audio plugins I find them lacking in overall quality. But there lots of nice ones for sure.
I’ve tried x42 we, it’s nice not not something I’m looking for, I have tons of eq plugins it’s hard to find use for all of them
Overtone is an option however I don’t want to spend any more money on plugins right now, I’ve spend a lot over the years,I need a break. I don’t even use half the plugins I paid for
You can get real analog sounding stuff with x42’s plugins combined with the TAP tubewarmth plugin, add a bit of hiss in (not sure if there’s a free hissing plugin haha, just download some tape hiss if you wanna), and impulse responses whether those be real spaces, guitar cabinets or both.
The analog sound is generally just:
- Nonlinear response aka distortion, aka use tubewarmth or wolf waveshaper for more custom control. Remember you can add it in MULTIPLE spots in your signal path for different effects. Add it before and after: eq, compression, reverb, echo. Very different results.
- Mastering the use of an EQ, analog stuff generally has a less bright sound to it, so a simple high shelf is your best friend. It lowers the highs without muffling the sound completely.
- A bit of wobbly vibrato will add to the authenticity depending on what sound you’re going for.
This is all very very much achievable and sounds absolutely delightfully awesome using just free plugins.
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Now I’m getting excited about this. @speak can you give some examples where in the signal chain to use tubewarmth in what cases. I’m definitely going to try this out, I miss the sound of analog although I also value exact digital reproduction in some cases.
Sadly there really isn’t a formula I can give you for where to add the distortion, it’s one of those things you just have to experiment. It’s simply different sounds, not better or worse, depending on where you add it. And how subtle you are it is another parameter that changes the results so wildly that there’s no way to just give you even a few simple formulas.
If you have a sound example you want “analogified”, I can process it in various ways to give you some examples. Or maybe I’ll just pick an example myself and cook something up for ya…
Here’s one example of various analog sounding effect chains. There’s a thousand different sounds you can get of course, but I’ll await for possible extra ideas and needs you might have that you can explain before I go any further.
The guitar clip repeats in order through the tracks shown in the screenshot.
edit: Just for fun, a simple drum loop driven through the same tracks:
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I am already playing around with some saturation plugins, but wasn’t aware of the vibrato thing and it really has its own interesting flavour.
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This is very interesting, thanks for the examples, these give some ideas about how use the plugins. I did some tests using tube warmth and Tap Chorus / Flanger and got some interesting results. Must try these on some of my old projects to see if I can lively up those.
Also I did’nt know about the new guitar amp emulation plugin Tamgamp, I spotted it in you screenshot More about it here:
https://linuxmusicians.com/viewtopic.php?t=21175
I hope we had a thread about how to get analog sound using Ardour, this is quite a good start
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Hmm maybe put the tube on the master and mix into it. Interesting
These audio samples are using the TAP tubewarmth plugin right ??