It's NOT just another saturation plugin!
Most home studio producers desire Analog Vibe, yet with so many alternatives like plugins and outboard gear, it is difficult to find the sweet-spot between cost and effectiveness. Many times, we settle for what we can afford, which often leads to disappointment.
Fact is, most hardware is too expensive and filled with features we likely don't need. And plugins many times don't deliver what they are selling. We just need simple products that work!
Before we go into how Tracker will impact your sound, we need to know what to expect from it.
TYPES OF HARMONIC SATURATION
There are basically two kinds of harmonic saturation: 1. Natural Saturation as a result of analog gear, and; 2. Saturation for Sound Design.
Natural Saturation is typically achieved when employing analog gear like a mixing console, preamps, compressors, EQs, etc. It occurs as a result of the signal being passed through the electronic components that make-up their circuitry. Analog gear is also emulated in many very popular plugins which I will analyze below.
Sometimes analog gear is used just for its color! For instance, the 1176 is a very popular compressor, and often times its owners will not employ compression at all but simply pass a signal through it to capture the harmonic saturation it imparts on a source. This is the concept behind Tracker, except all you are paying for is color! No expensive dials, compressors, power units, etc.
Sound Design - This category is typically associated with many different levels of distortion, which is a more extreme by-product of saturation. Here, a source is passed through a saturation process that results in an audible - or maybe not so audible - amount of "noise" that can be very pleasing to the ears if employed musically.
When we talk about the Analog Vibe effect, however, we are referring to Natural Saturation. We are not looking to transform our source, we just want to enhance it as much as naturally possible. Unfortunately, most saturation plugins impart too much distortion by default and it takes a keen ear or some advanced analysis to properly tune it.
So when we analyze the Tracker we are listening for a nuanced, natural improvement to the source. As you begin to stack these improvements on the entire mix, track by track, the aggregate changes will shift the mix away from a purely digital production to something that sounds like it was actually recorded on an analog console. This is the genius behind our simplistic approach to Analog Vibe!
HARMONIC ANALYSIS
Let's start with a dry oscillator generating a 100hz sine wave at -6dB:
Notice Pro-Q here is only registering a single spike at 100hz around -6dB. Now let's run that oscillator through the Tracker at Unity Gain:
The new spikes here represent harmonic products generated exclusively by the Tracker at what we consider a default, minimal send level (-6dB). When the 100hz signal becomes saturated, this even and odd harmonic series adds density to your source which is now accompanied by frequencies that are complimentary to the fundamental, 100hz signal.
This is a very common by-product of saturation and what most analog gear and plugins aimed at generating saturation looks like in a spectral analysis. It is also the magic of outboard, analog gear!
"Saturating a source generates even and/or odd harmonics, which makes the source sound larger than life!"
PLUGINS v. HARDWARE
However, when it comes to saturation plugins, many times they generate too many harmonics, resulting in noise and distortion. At first the high-end boost sounds pleasing and effective, but too many harmonics will make the high-end boost difficult to manage. These plugins are primarily intended for Sound Design rather than Natural Saturation.
Here is Decapitator, style [A] (API emulation) with a -6dB signal and Drive at 50%:
What you get from Decapitator out of the box is a sound design tool. Notice the frequency response is not flat. The low-end is attenuated and the high-end is boosted. This is not what we want from saturation. We want a flat frequency response and pleasing harmonics we can EQ more high-end or attenuate the low-end with an actual EQ if needed.
While this type of saturation may be useful in sound design, it is not what we typically seek-out during tracking. Instead, we want Natural, noise-free Saturation. When I A/B their API emulation, I can hear the additional noise the high-end boost is generating. With some tweaking we could limit the volume of this distortion, but at the cost of other things. Rather, we just want pleasing Saturation, no noise.
Now let's look at a plugin that should be aimed at Natural Saturation and comparable to the Tracker. Here is the harmonic analysis of the Vision Channel Strip from UA with a -12dB signal, everything disengaged, the input padded, and Mic Pre at around 40:
We are seeing similar bands of harmonics, but the gain associated with them is less that what we saw from Tracker. And at this level, notice we are near +18 on the meter, which means we are about to clip the signal.
Compared to the Tracker we don't have a lot of harmonics to gain without clipping, but here we go!
Now we are seeing a much higher level of harmonics but we are clipping the signal, with the same -12dB source and only a few more dB added to the Mic Pre:
So with the API Vision Strip, we either get mild harmonics, and no headroom, or massive ones with clipping. This is not what we want from a plugin for saturation!
It is safe to say, when we are considering saturation, we first need to be conscious of what kind of saturation we are looking to achieve, and then we need to know which tools will get us there.
How does the Tracker perform against this stress test? Well, we have already seen that at -6dB, Tracker gives us a gentle amount of saturation, but what happens when we increase the send level from -6dB to 0dB?
We get a heap more harmonic gain with very little additional send, and now we are at the point where the signal is just starting to clip:
So what happens if we push another 3dB into Tracker, from 0dB to +3dB:
Now that's some notable harmonic gain! And as we exceed 0dB, the signal will start to clip, here we see 0dB and +3dB waveforms compared:
And remember, clipping is not necessarily a bad thing. It can dramatically increase headroom and tame transients that compression was not fast enough to dampen. Depending on the source, a -3 to -6dB clip can be quite musical and unnoticeable...
Long story short, Tracker gives you more flexibility, a better performance, and is less tricky or noisy. All wins in my book!
"Natural Saturation should improve the quality of your source, not degrade it..."
Tracker is not a sound design tool. It will not damage your source or cause unnecessary distortion. It isn't fragile like some plugins and won't underwhelm you with its saturation response. There is no plugin trickery at play here. You get exactly what you want: Analog Vibe.