How To Get That Warm Vintage Tape Sound Using Just Logic

Hello!

Once I'd made a few loops and songs, I started to dive a bit more into trying to create a final song and attempting to complete my projects. To do this I had to start learning a little bit about mixing and mastering to get my audio quality levels up.

One of the most common and seemingly standard techniques I found in my research was using some sort of tape machine in order to give the song a warmer and more vintage feel. It's one of those plugins that's barely recognizable, but really seems to add that little extra something when you click it on and off. I realize those two ideas sort of collide with each other but you'll see what I mean when you put this into action.

There are tons of third party plugins out there that will do an amazing job at this! In the future perhaps I'll go over some of the options and their pros and cons but for today I wanted to concentrate on how you can get a simple version of this effect in Logic without spending any extra money.

First you'll need to open up the 'Tape Delay' plugin from the Audio FX section found halfway down the inspector channel. Left hand side to apply it to a track and right hand side to apply it to the whole project.

This is what the Logic tape delay plugin looks like:

Once here, you'll want to click the 'Tempo Sync' button in the top left to turn it off. You'll then turn the delay time down to 0.0 ms so that it now looks like this:

This turns off any of the delay the plugin brings to the track or song so that we can just get the 'tape' sound out of it without the delay. Try turning the delay time back up when we're finished to see the various effects it has! 

Finally we'll now adjust the dry and wet output bars in the bottom right so they look as below:

Play around with these settings as well. The wetness is what gives the added texture and feel to everything but various levels on each will produce some interesting results.

You can adjust all the different knobs under modulation, character and feedback as well but just doing as described above gives you a bit of that simple vintage tape sound that can create some additional warmness in your project. This can be a great way to get started to see how the effect can work, and from there you can explore various other plugins if it's something that seems important to you.

Does anyone have some recommendations on good third party plugins that they're currently using for this effect?

Thanks for your time and send me a link to any projects you've tried this out on, would love to hear!

Take care,

BPM :)