Hi all- I'd like to be able to make my recordings sound like they were done live, with bad equipment. A lot of the punk music I hear and listen to were intentionally recorded poorly, and I want to be able to mimic that in Logic. The best example of what I'm trying to achieve is a song by the Cheater Slicks called 'Walk Up the Street' (if you have spotify you can easily find and listen to this track!) I've tried getting some clean vocal tracks and fooling around with some warped reverbs, but if anyone else has any good ideas please let me know.

Hi Roy, Using EQ to muddy up the sound may help. Also consider the free plugin by iZotope called 'Vinyl'. Maybe mic up an amplifier to your interface (without the guitar being played) and record some subtle tones which you can mix in to the track. Hope that helps? Rounik

Cool, thanks rounik! Maybe one way to do this would be to try to quantify what a bad recording does to the sound; i.e. recording live music on a tape, what frequencies are cut/amplified?

Interesting idea.... well, one way if you would like to imitate the sound of the record you mentioned, would be to record a segment of it and load it into match EQ, capture it's EQ and apply it to your track! Then tweak it to taste... For me these kind of changes are really an ear thing... I'd take out some of the low end and high end and add some mid-low end to achieve a muddy feel. But with Match EQ you can get 90% of the way there fairly quickly. Btw, I love the Topic title. Really pulled me in ;-) Rounik

Just got Vinyl from Izotope, it's fantastic and just the kind of thing I love to have around. That and some EQ befuddling should do the job, but this sort of effect usually turns into an endless tweaking... I'll post here if I get any interesting results. Thanks again Rounik ..And I thought it might! ;)

It looks like Vinyl is good enough by itself as a plugin for the master track; and then tweaking some of the inbuilt presets. I love what it does with the drums and I imagine guitars underneath it will also sound great. For vocals I got some great effects with using a little distortion and some of the warped/amplifiers in the Space designer (namely the megaphone settings and bent circuits!). The vinyl plugin over the top really helps give the whole thing a 'recorded in our damp basement on the tape recorder that we borrowed from grandpa' feel that I was trying to achieve!

Glad you like it! I love Vinyl - for a while I placed it on every bassline (don't ask) that I was using... I find it works great for subtle effects unless of course you're doing some serious sound design work! Enjoy :o) Rounik

oh... also check out the bitcrusher (in Logic) - again use it subtly or perhaps even as a Send effect and mix it in. :) Rounik