The main theme for Shad stuff is to replicate the sound of Hank's lead line. Take for example his lead on W/Land. The main giveaway is the damped string as they move along the echo head placements and their timings and amplitude along with wow & flutter AT THE TIME OF HIS RECORDING. No one can place head No1 and so on to be placed in exactly the same postion of the tape as those notes were played. In effect you can't replicate W/Land or any other piece of music, not even Marvin himself because of this anomaly.
This is where VST come to the fore. The lead line, recorded dry, can be placed in 99% of the time within the VST and non destructivley trialed so that the taps and speed etc are placed in sync with the tape heads as they were originaly recorded.
What I do is to take the 10 seconds or so of the muted part where it's more easy to work and get that elusive di dit de dha within the echo pinned and save as a preset for the whole recording. Now Piet and Jacob have worked on settings for the eTAP Engineer. You can dig deeper with VST, you're able to bring the guitar gain up or down as happens in W/Land in your editor prior to the echo effect. It is possible therefore to match the amplitude of Marvin's gain and tone and then shove it through a VST echo.
Remember, all this is done as I said non-destructivley as you keep the original recording you've done to use as a master.
If you play and record your line to your PC with your stuff having been through an outboard amp--compressor--echo and so on then you can't work on the file. You need a dry unadulterated sound. You can do this within the digital domain.
Just think about it when thousands of £s are being spent on hardware for bedroom use.
Here endeth the lesson
Bri.
