The XLN RC-20 Retro Color analog tape saturation plugin is well known for its handiness on the master bus, but have you tried using it on individual instruments?

Today I’m going to walk you through a short demonstration on how you can use this inexpensive and eclectic plugin to breathe life into dull tracks.

Before We Start, Let’s Hear It In Action!

Here’s a Bass sample with and without RC-20 enabled. The first part is with the plugin bypassed. It will be hard to miss when RC-20 kicks in! Afterwards it’s bypassed again, and then enabled again.

Hear how it suddenly becomes more gritty, full, and colorful? That’s the magic of great analog tape saturation! The real benefit of carefully bringing this bass track to life comes when it’s living with a host of other instruments in a master mix. It’s easy for bass tone to get buried; some colorful presence can go a long way in bringing the underlying cadence of your song to life.

Now let’s dive into the specific steps it takes to add this kind of colorful saturation with RC-20:

Give Your Bass Some Gusto

I like to start by choosing a preset, something that’s close to the desired sound. Don’t worry, this isn’t “cheating”! Even many of the pros use presets to get started on an effect. For this synth bass track, I chose “Too Bright?” within RC-20‘s list of presets.

Well to answer XLN’s question, in this case, yes, “Too Bright?” is just a tad too bright for bass. So here’s where a few alterations come into play. You’ll notice in the bottom of the screenshot below that I’ve turned the high-pass filter down a bit to let a lot more low end come through, and added a mild low-pass filter. I’ve also turned down “Distort” and brought up “Space” to give the signal a little movement and some gritty reverb. Lastly I turned “Tone” down just a touch:

Now, in the end, I might listen to this track within the full mix and think it’s a little too lively, in which case I can adjust the wet/dry mix using the “Magnitude” bar at the top right of the plugin. But for now, I’m loving all of that added punchiness!

Bolster Your Brass Pads

Bass is one thing, but something like a brass pad—which sits relatively close to the font of the mix—needs some careful attention. There’s a fine like to walk between a flat, dull horn section or a tinny row of trumpets piercing your eardrums. When hearing the former, one might be tempted to throw on an EQ plug and start dragging up around 2K-10K. And sure, it might be a decent band-aid. But is it really the best tool for the job?

Take a listen to this brass pad track. My use of XLN RC-20 is a tad more subtle here, but you can really hear the track come to life when I flip off the bypass switch around 6 seconds in and again around 15 seconds:

For this effect, I started with the preset “Pad Magic” and made quite a few small adjustments. I turned “Noise” most of the way off (it’s just a white-noise generator simulating tape hiss), I turned “Wobble” off completely, “Distortion” up to around 25%, “Digital” completely off, and “Space” and “Magnetic” I turned up to 35%. I also turned up “Tone” and “Width” and lowered the overall gain just a touch.

“Space” and “Distort” are the two tools here which really liven up this brass pad the most. I want to bring up the highs with saturation (“Distort”) and then turn around and “muddy” up some of the tinny, unpleasant highs that come with it and spread them out in the mix so they aren’t, for lack of a better wording, stabbing our eardrums.

I even ended up putting a separate reverb plugin directly on this track later in the mix to exacerbate that “spreading it out” effect. If you go that route, just make sure to drag your wet/dry controls mostly to the drier side or you’ll end up drowning it in reverb!

Don’t Be Afraid To Experiment

These are just two examples of the many cases in which colorful saturation can bring a track to life. Some other interesting examples I’ve seen include using RC-20 to create parallel saturation on a doubled vocal or even using it to add grittiness or modulation on a reverb or delay send. As with anything else in audio production, anything is possible. So go on and give it a try!

Products in this blog post:

Now that more mixers are moving inside the box, we’re going to focus on a mix-bus plug-in setup that will give you excellent results. Since plug-ins now model the behavior of analog equipment, a good starting point would be to set up a mix bus the way you would work in a studio with a large-format console going to tape. If you have console and tape emulation plug-ins, you can set up a mix bus to model a widely used studio setup that spawned a thousand hits.

Start with a Clean Slate

In our example, we’re going to use the Slate Virtual Mix Rack with a console mix bus module (the gray one that says “MIXBUSS”). You can set the console model to one of 6 emulations, including two famous SSL desks, an API console, the legendary Trident A-Range console, or a custom RCA tube console. Next, pull up a UAD model of an SSL 4K bus compressor. From there, insert a tape emulation plug-in, from either Slate or UAD, depending on which you have or prefer. The settings are those that would normally be used for a 2-track master. For example, the Slate tape emulation plug-in gives you the option of choosing between 16-track and 2-track machines, two models of tape; Ampex 456 (FG456) and Quantegy GP9 (FG9), and 15ips or 30ips tape speed. For a master mix, select 2-track, FG9 tape for more clarity and punch, and 30ips tape speed to preserve transients. Set your console emulation and tape emulation to operate at nominal levels (0dB UV average).

Master and Compressor

Now that we have our large-format console mixdown emulation, how do we set the SSL bus compressor? The trick is to barely touch the compressor. Set the ratio at 4:1, slowest attack (30ms), fastest release (.1s), and set the threshold so that the needle just wavers slightly. Gain makeup should be around 1dB. You can stop there, or you can make things more interesting by adding other compressor plug-ins for their tonal quality. Here is where you can begin to craft your own final mix sound. For example, after the tape emulation, you might choose to use the Slate FG Red, which emulates the Focusrite Red 3, or perhaps a Sonnox Inflator. In either case, you’ll hear another increase in body.

The one recurring theme is to barely hit the compressor. The advantage of this approach is that you can boost your level one or two dB at a time with each instantiation and not overload the mix bus.

If you hear a resonance you’d like to tame, or a magical frequency you want to bring out, you can insert an EQ after the compressors, such as the UAD Manley Massive Passive. Just make sure it’s a high-quality EQ plug-in.

Expanding Your Horizons

The last component in the signal chain is a limiter, which is where you get your biggest volume boost. Some excellent choices would be the FabFilter Pro L, UAD Precision Limiter (if you’re looking for very transparent gain), and the McDSP ML4000 multiband limiter. While McDSP now has an 8-band limiter, the beauty of the ML4000 is that it’s now much more affordable and enables you to shape the tone of the entire mix via its expander modules. The expanders push more signal into the peak limiter section, filling out your mix in ways that the compressors don’t. (It’s actually quite surprising.) The ML4000 will give your mix a competitive level in relation to commercial releases, enabling you or your clients to hear what the mix will sound like after mastering—or, you just may wish to leave it that way and send it off to mastering.

One of the techniques that make up the “Abbey Road Sound” is referred to, colloquially, as the “Abbey Road Reverb Trick.” Before we discuss the how-to, let’s talk about the results. If you listen to plate or chamber reverbs in their natural state, there’s a lot of information going on throughout the frequency spectrum. In short, the lows make mud in a mix, while the highs can result in oddly distracting, unnatural reverb tails (think ’80s-style ballad reverbs). In reality space, we don’t often hear such reverb decays, and certainly not as distinctly as when exclusively assigned to a particular sound in a loudspeaker mix.

You Do You, Glue

The Abbey Road reverb EQ technique not only prevents a track from swimming in reverb and thereby losing intelligibility, it also offers a means of gluing instruments and vocals together in a mix. It eliminates annoying high-frequency tails, increases clarity, yet still provides the sheen and size that reverb can impart to a sound. The trick is actually quite simple and works with any and every reverb unit; hardware or software. If you’re working with plug-ins, insert an EQ with high and low shelving filters ahead of the reverb unit. Position is important. EQ placed ahead of the reverb results in a smoother sound, since you’re equalizing the frequencies that are activating the reverb’s reflection algorithms. Since reverbs often accentuate certain frequencies, placing EQ after the reverb doesn’t have the same effect as taming the frequencies before they come in to the unit.

Hard Pass

The essential part of this technique is to set the equalizer’s high-pass filter to a 12 or 18dB/octave slope and cut everything below 600Hz (that’s right, 600Hz). Set the low-pass filter with the same slope and cut everything above 10kHz. There you have it, the reverb EQ that Abbey Road has been using since the ’60s. However, you don’t have to stick with the high-frequency setting (the low frequency is not negotiable). You may find that cutting the highs down to 8kHz or 7kHz (or lower) works better on certain vocals or instruments in context. The idea is to reduce the highs until you can hear the vocal without the obvious high-frequency reverb tail. Another useful variation of the Abbey Road reverb EQ, in the case of vocals, is to notch out a tiny amount around 2kHz-4kHz, which will reduce possible harshness in the presence range. In the case of drums, you can cut highs further, even down to around 2.5kHz. It’s a very narrow frequency band, but it still offers all the benefits that reverb provides without adding high-frequency harshness (especially when there’s a lot of “metal-work” going on).

’Ear Now, What’s All This Then?

Unless you’re going for a special effect, such as the ’80s pre-delay followed by a high-frequency-rich tail (used most notably on percussion and snare), you can use the Abbey Road reverb technique on every instrument and vocal in your mix to achieve size, dimension, and blend. Above all, don’t be afraid to experiment. Start with the standard Abbey Road EQ settings at 600Hz and 10kHz and see where your ears take you.