Add Cassette Tape Soul to Your Music
If your in the box music production sounds cold and sterile, you may want to give it a lo-fi treatment to add some warmth and soul. Here's a few quick tips using lo-fi equipment.
The most obvious method is to record your whole track (or elements of it) on cassette tape, and then re-record it back to your DAW where you can apply some subtle mastering and finishing balance. The deck and tape will slightly saturate and compress your track. The frequency range within 3 dB bandwidth will differ from setup to setup, but most should manage at least up to 12 kHz.
Recording on analog tape will also add noise. From a technical quality point of view, your sound will be degraded – but that doesn't need to be bad.
If it wasn't for the small fluctuations of tape speed (wow and flutter), you could insert and sync your tape recording to your digital track in a New York parallel compression-style. But you can't. Smaller portions yes, but most certainly not the whole length of your track.
Another thing to try is playing an empty tape and record it in your DAW. Raise the input level and the mechanical device's noise, hiss, electric hum and such will be captured. You can then EQ and mix this audio in your track. Just sidechain compress it to a drum or an instrument bus and the noise audio will pulse and breath with the rest of your track more naturally.
