Analog Vs Digital

Analog VS Digital, a battle for the ages. Analog’s fatness, beefiness, and warmth VS Digital’s convenience, precision, and clarity. Which one is better? Well according to our guest on today’s podcast, you should use both.

Jed Seneca is a 40+ year veteran of music production. From engineering and producing to songwriting and being a recording artist. If it’s in the music business, he’s done it all. And Jed believes that analog and digital can work together. That you can leverage the best of both worlds and not be mutually exclusive.

On our postcast today Jed gave us 3 tips on how to bring analog and digital together:

1. Listen to analog records

You must give yourself a frame of reference. We need to know what analog sounds like. We need to know what digital sounds like. As you listen to records that were recorded, mixed, and mastered in analog you’ll begin to identify ways to bring analog into your digital process. When you listen to records from AC/DC, James Taylor, and Steely Dan you’ll get a sense as to how that should sound and then bring it into the digital domain.

2. Use plugins modeled using analog gear

More and more today companies are modeling analog gear in order to bring that analog sound to the clean and convenient digital world. They’re sampling real plates from Abby Road in London in order to bring that exact sound to the plugins. One of the big advantages of digital is the ability to copy a sound/frequency exactly as it is and reproduce that sound the same way every time. It’s truly a one to one copy. So using analog based plugins can definitely help you at that sound to your projects.

3. Mastering with analog

Most legit mastering houses will definitely have analog outboard gear. Even if you are totally in the box with your recording and mixing, sending your track to a mastering engineer with analog gear will definitely make a difference. Sending it out to add that final piece of analog fatness and warmth will take your track to another level.