Rock example

Power to Fly was recorded in Logic and mixed in Samplitude. It consists of 21 tracks, five busses and fifteen instances of Satin:

• Tape delay effect on the lead vocals
• A-Type encoding on the backing vocals to add ‘freshness’
• On the drums
• On the master

All other instances are set up as a multi-track entity, using Satin’s Group feature.

Drum bus

In these snippets, the chorus part of the song is soloed. The multi-track group on the individual channels is bypassed, only the Satin instance on the drums remains active. These examples show how saturation and the overall texture change with higher input gain and different kinds of equalization.

All examples use the Vintage tape setting and 15ips Tape Speed. The audio is separated into four sections: Bypass, +6dB, +12dB, +18dB.

The massive high frequency smear and loss of any transients should be clearly audible. But with moderate gain, Flat can be the right choice for taming harsh peaks and making everything round and soft.

Vocal delay

This example demonstrates how Satin can be used as a traditional 4-head tape delay, where all the tiny imperfections and complexities add up to an organic ‘vintage’ vibe:

Some noise-reduction systems were often mis-used by running the audio through the encoder circuit only, omitting decoding. Especially the A-Type systems gained popularity because they could add some pleasantly ‘airy’ compression. A nice exciter-type sound was possible when the lower two of the four frequency bands were bypassed by modifying the Cat 22 circuit board. This modification is also available in Satin.

If you are curious about how the regular Type-A sounds on the drums, check this one out: Bypass, Encoder, Decoder, Encoder & Decoder.

Metal example

This heavy metal song is courtesy of Blacky Schwarz-Ruszczynski, featuring Marian Gold (of Alphaville) on vocals. It consists of thirteen tracks using Satin’s Modern tape setting and a Vintage tape setting on the master bus.

The lead vocals and solo guitar are sent through an additional instance of Satin in Delay mode to give them more width. Presswerk and Samplitude’s eFX Gate and Reverb were used on drums, vocals and guitars.