This hot discussion topic has been a long time coming…
It’s a subject dear to my heart – mainly due to the serious amount of bullshit that surrounds it- particular in the wake of Grohls ‘Sound City’ and Young’s fucking ‘Pono’
Analogue and Digital. Which is superior….? ”Oh man, the warmth, the warmth, the warmth!!!!
I feel lucky that I got to straddle both worlds (it’s the only thing I do get to straddle these days…) I grew up as an assistant and engineer using tape and made the transition to using Pro Tools in the late 90s and early 2000s.
To be honest, it took me a while to be convinced by Pro Tools. One of my main motivations for being an audio engineer was Steve Albini (Pixies, Jesus Lizard, PJ Harvey) who, still to this day, exclusively works in the analogue domain (for reasons I’ll discuss later…)
My first exposure to Pro Tools as a recording tool was a painful affair.
A producer who I was assisting (shall I name him??), who was a right boring bastard was spending literally ALL FUCKING day editing a keyboard part on his new Pro Tools system…. this producer (who is an amazing guitarist for an early 80s punky funky band) was nudging audio around by milliseconds. For me, this kind of anal manipulation stops being music and enters the world of model making- obsessive for the person doing it, but hell for anyone observing, and at the end of the day who really gives a fuck. (Oh boy- I just used “anal manipulation” in a sentence…. the Google search visitors are going to be mightily disappointed!!)
This Pro Tools experience tarnished me for years…. what I didn’t appreciate then was that Pro Tools is essentially a really fucking cool tape machine…. with an amazing feature…. APPLE Z.
When working on 2” analogue tape we were restricted to 24 tracks (23 really, as time-code was often striped on 1 track for automation or sequencer synchronisation.) One reel cost a couple of hundred quid for 16 and a half minutes of recording time.
Lets compare this with the 1 Terabyte hard-drive I just bought for $100 and compare the data storage!!!
Editing takes has always been possible. I.e. if an artist has recorded a few takes of a song and likes the verse from take 1, the chorus from take 2 and the banjo solo from take 3…if this is on analogue tape the engineer SIMPLY marks out all the respective regions using a white china-graph pencil and using a razor blade and editing block slices up the tape and re-arranges it the correct sequence sticking it together with some Sellotape, vinegar and brown paper…a major operation.
If upon doing this he realises he’s sliced a bit too much off the front of the kick drum or the reverb tail sounds odd, it’s MERELY a case of rummaging around in the offcuts and splicing back in a few centimetres of tape. This is clearly silly. This operation on Pro Tools would take a fraction of the time to audition…and there is always the wonderful UNDO function ☺
There is something romantic about the notion of being restricted to 23 tape tracks but in the cold light of day when the vocalist wants to sing 50 takes and compile from his greatest hits- digital non-destructive editing is clearly the winner.
“But what about the sound!!!”…
I always ask my students…”which captures the truest representation of the signal coming from a microphone…analogue tape or Pro Tools?”
Invariably they say analogue- but this is not true…
Analogue tape and in fact all analogue circuitry introduce a subtle distortion that is not present on the microphone’s signal…digital doesn’t do this. It’s a completely different argument as to whether this introduced distortion enhances the sound or not. Personally, I am a fan of this distortion- but I am a fan of most distortion. This addition of harmonic content can be replicated in Pro Tools using outboard FX or the multitude of plug-in distortions that do an pretty fucking good job of fooling me anyway. (Decapitator!)
“But digital is just a jagged approximation of the analogue sound unless you record at very high sample rates”
No sir- this is not true. 44.1Khz and 16 bit is actually fine as a listening format- there are arguments for recording and processing at slightly higher bit depths (and maybe sample rates) but I can point you towards the science if you don’t believe me…. crikey next you’ll be telling me the Nazis are forcing us to listen to music at 440Hz.
Vinyl records are a nice possession to own and file away alphabetically in an IKEA shelving solution- I have a collection myself…but….there were many many shit records made on vinyl. And plenty of good shit released on CD. I guarantee you that most people listening to vinyl in the 60s and 70s had appalling sound-systems (with stupidly thin vinyl cos the price of oil was so high…damn arabs)
So….Steve Albini and a few other analogue purists have an interesting argument with regards to the longevity of today’s digital formats. We could easily be saying in 20 years time…”A Wav…! What is a wav and how do I play a Pro Tools 11 session on my Samsung organic computer- does anyone own one of those old Apple things?” – but I guess we could argue the same against tape (it doesn’t last well unless its stored in the right conditions…)
To conclude- all I can say is, we are in an era when we can take advantage of both worlds. The filth and distortion and romance and nostalgia from analogue tools, but the convenience and flexibility and non-destructiveness and ground-breaking-ness of the latest digital audio workstations. Essentially – use both- do your research- and stop regurgitating arguments cos your favourite rock-drummer turned front-man releases a documentary….
I’ve not posted round these parts for a while- all the action has been over at my Facebook page (
