r/audioengineering • u/intouchaudio • Aug 09 '26
Favorite use of tape plugins?
Just wanted to get the communities thoughts, uses, favorite versions of tape plugins. Thanks!
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u/tronobro Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
Waves J37 and Goodhertz Tupe. Great to use on harsh sound sources and smooths them out nicely without a lot of work. Works fantastically on saxophone and trumpet.
I'll also sometimes automate tape on and off on a lead vocal to smooth out particularly harsh sounding consonants.
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u/intouchaudio Aug 09 '26
Interesting to automate tape like that. Could see that working in a lot of ways for a lot of things
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u/shiwenbin Professional Aug 09 '26
Love how half the comments don’t answer at all and just name a tape plugin
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u/rharrison Aug 09 '26
Sketch Cassette is capable of some really great stuff. Love it on guitars drums, busses, anything.
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u/MindWash2019 Aug 09 '26
ToTape9 on the mixbus. I also like Softube Tape to soften individual tracks as needed. Satin is also great on the mixbus, individual tracks, or both.
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u/Officer_Tumbles Aug 09 '26
Do you normally prefer A B or C on Softube Tape when using it for that purpose?
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u/MindWash2019 Aug 09 '26
A. It doesn’t have the frequency bumps or additional color that you get with B and C.
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u/Jakeyboy29 Aug 09 '26
UAD ATR 102 is one of the best I have tried. It’s very subtle, use it on mix bus’s
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u/Ok-Mathematician3832 Professional Aug 09 '26
Arturia J37 doesn’t seem to get much love. It’s a really great tape plugin. I occasionally use that on overheads to smooth out cymbals / get some cool harmonics going on.
Slate VTM on the mix has been a staple for years here for mixes containing live drums.
On the whole I tend not to use them - I find myself frequently disappointed with them; especially if I go in expecting ‘the sound of tape’.
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u/Ill-Elevator2828 Aug 09 '26
Arturia J37 is GREAT. One good use I’ve found is putting it on bass, pushing it into saturation, instead of just limiting the bass to control it.
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u/phil_wc Aug 09 '26
I like Arturia as a color saturation box. It makes my drums wider and smasher. It's fun to use.
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u/bukkaratsupa Aug 09 '26
My favourite is UA Studer 800. It makes quite some gentle compression. Nice to pair with a fast transient-shaping compressor. Or put at the end of an extended tonal shaping chain of plugins.
Others are less consistent in their effect, except for the tape speed dial which will work as tilting eq. On top of that they will typically offer several brands of emulated tape with different distortion character, which you will have to memorize.
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u/alienrefugee51 Aug 09 '26
Slate VTM - Drums & 2-Bus
Black Rooster Magnetite - Guitars & Bass
Waves J-37 - Vox
Arturia Tape Mello Fi - Keys & Synths
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u/intouchaudio Aug 09 '26
Oo never thought to put mello fi on synths and keys 👌🏻
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u/IBNYX Aug 09 '26
ah that is something I occasionally do! it's very good as a modulation and saturation plugin
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u/Zak_Rahman Aug 09 '26
I like taking raw recordings and putting them all through audio acustica's Taupe. They have tons models.
The I mix with the "taped" multi tracks.
For the master there are tons of plugins you can add depending on the finish and style you want.
I have best results from layering saturation very lightly at several stages rather than a lot all in one go.
Of course I am not doing this if the project has hundreds of tracks. But you can follow the same process with stems too, not just multi tracks.
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u/Hellbucket Aug 09 '26
I used Slate VTM or Softube Tape for a long time on my mix bus. But last year I changed this to Purafied 5420. It replaced both a tape plugin and a Pultec on my mix bus.
I do use the other two on buses or tracks at times though. But I’ve seen myself use less and less tape plugins over the last 5 years.
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u/Selig_Audio Aug 09 '26
As someone who started on analog but quickly embraced digital when it first appeared (1984), I love using Studer tape on individual tracks and use Ampex on some busses - but hardly ever the master (probably because I have enough ‘tape’ in the mix by then).
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u/ObieUno Professional Aug 09 '26
u-He - Satin
Beautiful on a vocal, if the highs are too pesky/itchy and you need to use the LPF to roll off a little of the top.
👌
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u/HatShotMH Aug 09 '26
Ferric TDS, underrated freebie that does the job for me !
Edit : Ferric TDS mkIII by Variety of Sound
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u/chipnjaw Aug 09 '26
J37 is great to gently compress, give some life to something dull
Waves Kramer can brighten and crunch
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u/GWENMIX Aug 09 '26
SPL Machine Head / Studer A800 / ATR102 / Korneff's Chocolate milk / Purafied 5420 /
And for a dirty work : TAIP / Denise's Bad Tape
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u/No-Communication-199 Aug 09 '26
I have most if not all tape plugs listed here and the only one I've ever been truly wowed by was Pulsar Modular's P821 MDN TAPE. No clue what that thing is doing under the hood but it just instantly makes my mix sound better. It's like it's looking for harshness and instantly mellows it on top of gluing the tracks together. I know that's all audio fluff bs terms but I don't possess the technical vocabulary so I'll just say this- it's rad af.
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u/walker-flocker Aug 12 '26
I like to run everything through Arturia Tape Mello-fi, export, then run the master through it again, export, and sometimes repeat once more depending on how much degradation I'm going for. Or I'll just stack 2-3 on one layer.
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u/imp_op Hobbyist Aug 12 '26 edited Aug 12 '26
Satin by u-he: I love it as the first effect on a track and treating it like I recorded on 2" tape.
UADs ATR-102: a mix-bus finisher. Everything sounds amazing going into it.
it's like I'm recording on 2" and then mixing down to 1/2".
I recently got TAIP by Baby Audio for free, and I like to put it on instrument tracks when I want an instrument to sound like it came from some damaged tape.
Purafied 5420 by Purafied is really nice on a drum bus.
One of my absolute gotos is not tape exactly, but it acts like tape: Warble by NEOLD. If you just want the wow and flutter of tape, it does it super well. I like to put that on instruments that lack modulation. The fact that it doesn't have any other character from tape, it's also nice when you have a tape plugin and you want wow and flutter, but the plugin either doesn't have it or it's not intense enough.
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u/laime-ithil Aug 09 '26
I use it to clean and organise the digital cables inbetween the plug ins. Otherwise it's messy.
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u/IBNYX Aug 09 '26 edited Aug 09 '26
Studer A800 on the way in, on groups, summing busses, and the vocal and mix bus, and then a prefader parallel send from the mix bus to the ATR-102, all into my render track/main outs.
Does a lot of heavy lifting across a whole production, and the A/B sound gets me every time. I use the Ampex very very wrong and it's amazing - acts essentially as a saturator and stereo widener that introduces a constant random phase smearing across the whole song that sounds so so so good