How To Make Your Tracks Sound Vintage and Old

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If you've ever wanted to make a sound track, an instrument sound old after it's been recorded, this video is all about that. I'm going to walk you through how I do it and how I've learned to do it from watching other YouTubers and from other classes and learning and reading about how people do it. And I can share that knowledge with you.

My name is Zion and I am the founder of the Triple Threat Artist online production course. If you're interested in producing your own music, becoming a Triple Threat, which is a singer songwriter producer, you want to check us out. We've got a lot of great information. Myself and my friend, Josh, who is an amazing producer. We create content for young producers, people that are trying to produce on their own to help them get to where we've gotten, which is having some success. Being able to sell songs, working for other artists, getting asked and paid to produce other people, getting songs that we've produced into film TV, and get licensed. If you would like to learn from us, check out the links below.

All right, let's get into this. I'm going to show you how to create that old vintage sound.

So let's start off talking about this track here. This is a low-fi track for our the channel that I'm the music manager for called Lo-Fi Panda Music. Check us out. And this is … one of my producers put this together. It's really great. Great little song, got a great background vibe. You can do homework to it or whatever. There's a sound in here that's a really cool Rhodes Organ that I really like. Sounds like this (music playing) It's got a great vibe to it, that old electric piano.

I want to make the sound even more vintage. I want to really make it sound older. So one of the very first things you should do oftentimes is reach for your EQ and pull down some of the high end. So we're going to do that in this. This actually has some stereo width to it too, but I'm going to pull down some of that low end, the high frequencies.

Okay. And I should say that node two is actually sidechained to the kick drum, and that's why you're seeing it move up and down. This particular instrument, doesn't have a lot of real high frequencies in it, which is totally fine. So it's not, not super noticeable, but I've got that. EQ going on. The next thing you want to do is try to figure out some way of making the pitch warble or wobble, or however you want to say that - oscillate and there's different ways of doing it. I'm going to use a tool called RC-20. It's one of the, one of my favorite tools that I've purchased over the last year. And this makes anything sound really old, really fast. Now I'm going to illustrate these ideas using this tool, because it's just a lot easier than me trying to use a bunch of different tools for this video.

But the concept is all the same, whether you use this tool or not, the concepts apply. So the very first thing we want to do is we want to find a good wobble. Now, in this tool, there's a whole area right here for wobbling and there's two different types of wobbles. It basically gives you a really fast one. It's they call it a flutter and then a slow wobble, which is called a wow.

So we're going to put it all the way over to the wow and find a good, slow wobble. That sounds like the taper is playing back. Like the tape machine has a, has a bad I don't know, playback engine in it. (music playing) And it turned up the gain a little bit on this. So we can switch that around. We can add a little more or a little less, That would be an extreme, I don't want to do that. I want to kind of bring it back here And now let's add a little flutter to this as well. That would be extreme. So we're not going to do that. We're going to bring it down here. (music playing)

I like that. And there's different areas in this that you can tweak and stuff. This is kind of a randomizer and this is sort of a steady speed of the sine wave. All right. Let's add some noise now to this. And a lot of old tape machines in vinyl have a crack and a pop to it. And tape machines often have hisses to it. Kids - tape machines were things we used to use to listen to music on. All right, I'm being stupid. So this is the, the cassette sound. We're going to cycle through some of these (music playing).

Nice. So now we give a little bit crack and pop from a vinyl. And we can tweak that if we want to, but that sounds pretty good to me. And now we can add a little saturation or distortion. Distortions are just extreme saturation. So I they're often interplayed as far as how you talk about them. Distortion adds harmonics basically. Sometimes those harmonic sound rough and sometimes it sound really good. So let's see if we can add a little distortion to this. (music playing)

I like that there's some nice kind of warm tubes that are being, it's just a little oversaturated in there. Sounds good. I like that. If we wanted to, we could add some digital distortion. I don't like this so much. It'll make your song sound distorted, but it will be much more modern sounding. I don't want that.

Space. We can give it some space and decay, but we, I really want it dry magnetic is just like, if it's being played off of a, a, a tape, sometimes you'll have the little dropouts and stuff like that from the wear of the tape. So let's see how that would sound. (music playing)

So I don't necessarily think that's really adding a whole lot, but I'm going to keep it on. It definitely sounds a little more like a tape, a bad tape where sometimes the stereo even cuts out a little bit. So anyway, the point of this is to understand how you could use this. You could use this on vocals or all kinds of things, but the very first thing I would do is definitely cut the high end of your frequencies.

This actually has an EQ in it, and I can cut that here. It, it's already kind of preset to be cut and it's using a low pass filter. There's a hard cut and a soft cut. So start with the EQ. You want to make sure your EQ makes it sound dull. Things that sound real bright and tinny usually sound more modern as things age, the old mediums like tapes and vinyls as they age, they actually sounded much more dull.

So you want to do that. I usually like to start with a wobble to add a little bit of variation in the pitch. Then from there, you're just kind of adding just as everything else is sort of gravy, a little distortion. If you want that a little noise, like the crack and hiss. Sometimes that can be a mix nightmare though. So be careful with that also, when you're introducing hiss and you're introducing cracks, those are high frequencies and you may have to dull those out as well. And you can do, there's a tone knob in this.

And then if you want to add some magnetic where to it, I would love to know what is under the hood and what makes the software actually do its thing. But it is pretty cool. Again, this is RC-20. I like this a lot. I think this, this, I can't remember who makes this I'll put the link below, but oh, XLN-Audio is who makes it, but it's one of my favorite go-to plugins for making things old.

I used to have to do a lot of this work manually to make things sound old and use like LFO's to, to move the pitch around like this, and then grab a sample off of splice and mix that in and for the hiss of a of a cassette and then put it through some distortion. I have to do all this stuff manually. One step at a time.

Now I can just grab a preset in here and they're usually really quite good. All right. So that is basically it. I'm going to put it on one more instrument and let's see how that sounds. Let's find another part in the song. There's a guitar part in here. Yeah, here we go. So I've already done it to the strike, but let's take it off and see how it sounds. I'm going to put this here. So there was already a little bit of a warble going on in the sample, but I made it even more extreme by adding RC -20 to it. And this is how it sounded The mix. (music playing)

And one of the things I like to do is because those strings, those pizzicato strings are very, very clean sounding. And this is kind of, warbly sounding, there's a contrast there. And I like that contrast because on one hand, your ears are hearing something very clean. And on the other hand, they're hearing it, it gives a lot more flavor to the song if there's differences. So contrast, contrast, contrast is such an important tool in your production arsenal.

All right, guys, I hope that helped. If you have any questions, hit me up below, subscribe to the YouTube channel.

Peace.

Zion

 RC-20 Link: https://www.xlnaudio.com/products/addictive_fx/effect/rc-20_retro_color

ALN Audio link: https://www.xlnaudio.com/ 

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