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Making a modern recording sound like 1950s

I thought it would be neat if I could record some spoken words today and make them sound like they were recorded in the 1950s. Listen to the general sound of the speech in this collection of commercials, for example:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jFRShOZP_w

A couple of things are an obvious part of the sound: the noisiness, and the reduced frequency response in both highs and lows compared to recordings made today. There is sometimes a bit of distortion on loud parts as well. But do you have any other ideas on how to achieve a "'50s" or general "old" sound?

Well, first you need to imitate Zapp Brannigan poorly...

Sounds to me there's quite a bit of wow/flutter (or whateveryoucallit) like on old, poorly handled tapes. It also seems like a lot of the time the recordings might be pitched up or down a very tiny amount.

Start with Izotope Vinyl.

quote:

Originally posted by cryophonik Start with Izotope Vinyl.

Free, nice. I think this plus a free tape saturation plug I downloaded the other week may do nicely.

maybe try speakerphone

If you are making the voice yourself, speaking into a cup helps.

http://www.digidesign.com/index.cfm?itemid=4201

I've used the BF76 when I was school, and I had to make a fake radio commercial...It gave me that 'radio' timbre, if that makes sense.

I would also add noise, maybe a tiny bit of distortion.

You'll need to emulate the accent too. People spoke differently back then and that might be difficult.

I'm not really going for an exact "TV announcer voice" imitation, just the general character of the audio.

http://www.otiumfx.com/sonitex.php
Is really great for this kind of stuff. Everything you could ask for in terms of degradation.

Run your finished product through a digital radio so you can record the output but on an AM band. Instant 1950s poor quality.

You may need a way to transmit on an AM band though

i'd probably record it onto a really old tape and dub it over and over again as the final product, but prior to that yeh feed it through izotope vinyl and get them bandpass filters on them

the absolute best product you can buy for this is Speakerphone. It is a serious of about 450+ convolutions of eq/compression/bit reduction settings used to emulate old recordings, lo-fi & hi-fi sounds etc. i use this thing ALL THE TIME and love it. I did the intro to this remix with it:

(listen to the passion pit remix)

myspace.com/gryeghost80s

One way to do this (among other cool things). Find some garage sales, surplus stores, etc... in your area and pick up a variety of shitty old boom boxes. Feed whatever you want through them with a 1/8" -> cassette setup, and feed it a source signal just hot enough to start distorting at the peaks. Use the bass and treble controls on the boom box to muffle the highs and kill the lows. Mic the output with a shitty computer mic, experiment with different contact mics if you have them (or make yourself some if you don't), etc. Tweak the result to taste with whatever you want.

quote:

Originally posted by hexadecimal One way to do this (among other cool things). Find some garage sales, surplus stores, etc... in your area and pick up a variety of shitty old boom boxes. Feed whatever you want through them with a 1/8" -> cassette setup, and feed it a source signal just hot enough to start distorting at the peaks. Use the bass and treble controls on the boom box to muffle the highs and kill the lows. Mic the output with a shitty computer mic, experiment with different contact mics if you have them (or make yourself some if you don't), etc. Tweak the result to taste with whatever you want.

Interesting idea, thanks.

I had thought of getting a cheap tape recorder to experiment with degrading sounds as well.

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