subsekt

How do I get that vintage vst sound?

Subsekt 2020

Lost to the Void wrote:How do I get that vintage vst sound?

Subsekt 2020

To get that real vintage VST sound you need to get your hands on one of these sick vintage 2003 russian Windows XP cracks, the viruses included give it that real lo-fi sound. The thing is, you can't get them online anymore so they're traded on shitty, sketchy looking CDRs. The sketchier looking, the better, you used to get this kind of stuff by the boatload for a fiver but people have caught up to them, prices on ebay have been steadily rising, so you gotta look out to get a good deal.

Once you have your XP up and running, the important thing is to not use any proper paid VSTs, they just don't sound vintage and lofi enough. You gotta look out for that really shitty freeware with eye cancer inducing GUIs that look and sound like they've been programmed by a 13 year old between jerking off sessions. There's some absolutely amazing stuff out there where the guy cleared didn't know a single thing about DSP, plugins that produce ridicuoulsy awesome vintage VST rectangle clipping even at -80db input levels. The holy grail are russian cracked redistributions of freeware VSTs that only periodically put out disgusting digital clipped noise, but they're the Jupiter 8s of the vintage VST world, super expensive and super rare. The good thing is, there's a lot of vintage VST emulations out there these days but honestly, they just don't have that real vintage VST russian freeware crack redistribution sound. Really good vintage VSTS just have a certain kind of magic, they're living things, the viruses slowly break the code and the ones and zeros flow in ways that you just can't get with modern VSTs, One of my vintage VSTs is totally broken and puts out audio that literally sounds like it's stair-stepped, it shouldn't be possible according to DSP theory but that's vintage VST magic for you.

Then problem with today's vst's is that they sound just like hardware, and hardware is so last generation.
The great thing about old early vst's is that they sound completely unique, they were sooooo digital, and that kind of stiff rigidity is lacking in today's music where everything is loose and slightly out of time. And everything sounds so warm and woolly and saturated, but a cooler, more precise sound is sommcuh cooler and you just can't get that from today's instruments.

There's a company that makes cool boutique pentium 3 style PCs with component for component recreations of old soundblaster sound cards.
Surgeon uses one is his new PA.
He did an interview about it.

I'm going to buy one soon, today's techno sound so lame compared to 2003.

i just liked taking the gamble on keygens. 50% of comments say it's infected, %50 say it's safe. Eh lets roll the dice!

The secret was to run your final mixdown through the keygen, it made everything even more cold and digital, but in a warm and analogue sort of way.

You can get an xp emulator instead. You have to use linux and install dos emulator, then dosshell emulator before the xp emulator will work but it sounds so noughty ..

nah gonna dig out the old 133. when you crank it, the whole think slows down and you get that old pc swing on the hats.

This thread is beyond my comprehension.

There are like 1000 reasons why a 90s track doesn't have everything perfectly lined up. The groove of the 909 sequencer, fluctuating analog VCOs, tape flutter, midi jitter and so forth. It was simply there within the setup. I often hated it.

And I don't feel that music right now feels robotic. It's just easy to depict what's been made by a freshman and what hasn't. I like that very much.

winston wrote:if you done it in software it was 16 samples, but on the machine it was 65 or something.

Anyone going on about their timing being off by 50 samples isn't actually capable of making music worth listening to.

Mono-xID wrote:BUT... BUT...But it's Techno!!! It IS music for robots, it's machine music. It's future.

I'll take a "on grid" Steve Bicknell loop over some swung out tech/house track anytime.

There is a difference between swing and humanization.
What OP is talking about is sounds being spread out a bit due to imperfection syncing of midi clocks of hardware stuff, plus the latency which comes with meters of MIDI cable and MIDI processing times of each individual channel. It's very subtle but goes a long way in giving the tune groove and a natural feel that sounds very pleasing to the ear. Bicknell has a lot of it in his music, and so do Slater, Mills, DJ Skull etc.
Reason has a cool little thing called the ReGroove mixer which lets you assign time-shifting, different shuffles, different scopes of timing/velocity randomization and grooves to individual channels. You don't really hear it as swing. It rather slows down the rhythm a bit and makes it hit harder. I use it a lot in my music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlhjo3Y_V90

Lag wrote:

Mono-xID wrote:BUT... BUT...But it's Techno!!! It IS music for robots, it's machine music. It's future.

I'll take a "on grid" Steve Bicknell loop over some swung out tech/house track anytime.

There is a difference between swing and humanization.
What OP is talking about is sounds being spread out a bit due to imperfection syncing of midi clocks of hardware stuff, plus the latency which comes with meters of MIDI cable and MIDI processing times of each individual channel. It's very subtle but goes a long way in giving the tune groove and a natural feel that sounds very pleasing to the ear. Bicknell has a lot of it in his music, and so do Slater, Mills, DJ Skull etc.
Reason has a cool little thing called the ReGroove mixer which lets you assign time-shifting, different shuffles, different scopes of timing/velocity randomization and grooves to individual channels. You don't really hear it as swing. It rather slows down the rhythm a bit and makes it hit harder. I use it a lot in my music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlhjo3Y_V90

Yeah this is what im trying to say. The term swing might not be the best way to describe it but i find them subtle shifts in timing make a big difference to my music.

Just a concept for peeps to try in their music if they havent yet.

You can drag tracks out of sync in ableton with track delay on each track. Bottom of the mixer.
Handy to realign your transients as well, as plugin delay compensation isn`t always perfect.
I use it quite a lot to loosen up/spread out transient hits, you only need to move by a few samples sometimes, but it can get your rhythms to lock in nicely sometimes, and it can help give the boot to stuff like phase cancellation.

The only minor issue I have with that is that it's in ms. Reason does it in ticks so if you, once in a blue moon, change the tempo within the track - the relative distance between the sound and the grid stays the same.

Lag wrote:The only minor issue I have with that is that it's in ms. Reason does it in ticks so if you, once in a blue moon, change the tempo within the track - the relative distance between the sound and the grid stays the same.

It can be in milliseconds or samples actually, if it is in samples then it moves with tempo.

Oh cool!

The documentation in ableton is not very good in making that clear.
A lot of people don't realise that if you click the ms box it changes to smp (samples)