Recreating 90's DIY Demo Tape Tones (to chill and study to)

One of my clients messaged me to listen to the artist “Hether.” The client wanted their following recordings to sound close to the album “Hether – Sticky Thumb.” When listening, it instantly reminded me of the 90’s DIY indie grunge demo recordings from one of my biggest inspirations growing up, Elliott Smith. Most of Elliott’s earliest recordings do not sound clean and detailed. They’re smeared and low quality.

During the height of lofi beats (to chill and study to), I gained a lot of experience through my work, turning pristine sounds into what most artists wanted to emulate. Tape machines. The entire spectrum. Cassette tapes to studio multitrack recorders. A couple of plugins I will cite that make this task as easy as one button are XLN’s “RC-20” (most popular) and Aberrant’s “SketchCassette II” (a more full-featured cassette tool). When someone wanted to go all out, I would use the incredibly accurate sounding “Cassette Deck 1 & 2” by Cupwise in Acustica Audio’s “Nebula 4”.

I want to approach this recording a bit differently. Instead of using a one-stop shop like the previously mentioned processors, I want this to be a from-the-ground-up approach to the recording process.

This first thing is to think about how the demo tapes would have been captured in the ’90s. They would have used cheap dynamic microphones, recorded to a less than ideal portable consumer cassette tape recorder, and most likely, it would have been recorded in a small, reverberant room like a bedroom or kitchen.

The chain I’m going to recreate is quite simple. Dynamic microphone -> small room reflections -> cassette tape/deck. The first stage aims to create a more smeared and blurred tone that carves off some details and nuances. The second stage is to recreate the type of room tone you would also have captured while recording an instrument. The third is to create DIY, inconsistent cassette tape characteristics comprising warbling, vibrato, and mechanical noise (wow & flutter).

Slate Digital supplied the mics we are using to record. One Slate ML-1 and two ML-2s. The ML-1 will record the voice, and the ML-2s will be used to capture the acoustic guitar in an X/Y stereo pattern. I always recommend these mics to clients and keep them in my personal microphone locker. They are extraordinarily detailed, clean, and hi-fi for the price. The characteristics are the exact opposite of the sound I’m seeking on the surface. With the clean and neutral sound though, Slate microphones are great for processing. You can sculpt and shape them into any style you need.

I’m using a few saturators to tackle the blurred aspects: Kush Audio’s “Omega-TWK” and AudioThing’s “Wires” (Very, very cool. It emulates a soviet-era wire recorder). “Wires” also has an echo processor, which mixed in a slight delay. The delay helps create a sense of small space while obfuscating details behind a cluster of short repeats.

To create the room tone, I added FabFilter Pro-R, set to the “Lively Ambience” preset under “Ambience.”

For the tape deck component of the sound, I used AudioThing’s “Reels.” I turned off every element except the WOW/FLUTTER and DROPS. These settings in Reels create instability and pitch modulation, recreating less-than-ideal tape decks and tape medium. As a final measure, I EQ’d the sound, removing some top and low end, which gives the impression the tape has aged, producing a darker, less detailed quality.

I find these from the ground up approaches much more beneficial for tone in the end. You can edit the processing for whatever the song needs, and it helps create a full-featured picture to transport the listener. Yes, some plugins successfully do all these steps in one big sweep. Still, it’s an excellent exercise to stop and think about the concept of a sound and how it was achieved and captured in earlier eras and then recreate those tones using modern tools and techniques.

I am unable to post the work we created, so I used a loop from Splice “EVIGAN_guitar_loop_acoustic_strum_80_Amin” to create a demonstration of the tone, which I have posted below.