Nothing Beats Tube Harmonics

Hey Nerdz! So yesterday I said that when it comes to harmonics, plug-ins don’t come close to recreating the authentic sound of analog gear. This is the category where I think plugins are the the farthest away from sounding like real analog gear. Harmonics are additional tones that are added to a signal, usually through distortion. When an analog circuit is overloaded, it clips the waveform and causes small ripples at the crest of the wave. The shape and size of these ripples is based on the shape and size of the original wave, and how many ripples is based on how how hard the signal is being overdriven. These ripples are the waves created which we hear as harmonics, and they are mathematically related to the original sound. If the additional sound waves were random, it would be white noise. But since they are mathematically related to the original tone, it creates a fuller and richer sound. This fuller richer sound is the elixir of audio that everybody chases, but very few achieve. The best way to get this sound is from amplification circuits that use vacuum tubes. Vacuum tubes clip the signal in a way that’s unique. There are other ways to clip the signal, and create mathematically related harmonics, but they’ll also create harmonics that are random, so it will have white noise mixed in. Vacuum tubes create less random harmonics, and more nice harmonics than any other medium. As you get into the higher frequencies, these nice harmonics become too complex that they haven’t been able to model this very precisely with plugins. I’m mostly referring to guitar amp emulations, as well as some saturation emulations, such as the thermionic culture vulture, and the black box HG-2. I spent some time obsessing over this tone. I even went as far as taking an electronics course and building my own tube amp with a line output coming straight off the tube to directly record the tube saturation. I’ve used a variety of tube gear, and there’s a certain “type” of sound that tubes create. In my experience, amp emulation software has nice harmonics in the lower frequencies, but it turns to white noise in the higher frequencies, and it sounds rather scratchy. I’m not saying saturation plugins don’t sound good. There are some which I use often and I think they sound great, they just don’t sound like analog gear. Have you ever had fresh, vine ripened fruit, like a ripe peach picked off the tree? Well that’s what the analog gear is like. Most plugins are like the powdered flavour you can add to anything. It kinda captures the essence of the real thing, but if you didn’t know it was supposed to be peach flavoured, you might not naturally make the association. Some really good plugins are like a store bought peach that was picked premature and artificially ripened in the store. It’s clearly a peach, but not as good as vine ripened. I have the thermionic culture vulture plug-in by UAD, and this is like the store bought peach. Though I’ve never used the original hardware, I know what tubes sound like, and this is the only tube saturation plug-in I’ve used that’s more like a store bought peach, where all other amp emulations and tube saturation plugins I’ve used are more like the flavoured powder.

There’s 2 types of technology used for amplification, tubes and solid state. Which one sounds better? I’ll get into that tomorrow.