How to make audio sound like VHS
The VHS sound isn't one effect. It's a stack of faults all happening at once, inside a machine that was never meant to sound good. I've been recreating them in plugins since 2013, and this is what you're up against.
First, which VHS?
VHS machines had two completely different audio systems, and they sound nothing alike.
- The linear track is a thin mono stripe along the edge of the tape, moving slower than a cassette. It's the sound most people mean by “VHS”: narrow, hissy and unsteady.
- VHS Hi-Fi arrived in the mid-1980s and writes the sound with the spinning video heads. It's far cleaner, and it has faults of its own.
If you're after that worn, rental-shop sound, it's the linear track you want.
What you're actually hearing
- A narrow, worn tone. Slow tape can't hold much top or bottom end, and every copy of a copy loses more.
- A level control that pumps. Most VCRs rode the recording level by themselves, and you can hear them doing it.
- Wobble. Wow and flutter from stretched tape and sticky reels.
- Misaligned heads. The top end goes dull and wanders.
- Tape out of headroom. Loud moments thicken and crunch.
- Hiss, hum and damage. Noise from the tape, mains hum from the machine, and the pops and dropouts of a tape played to death.
Anything taped off the television has one more layer, because broadcast sound was already dense and loud before it reached the tape.
Why a filter and some noise won't get you there
The usual advice is to cut the highs and lay some noise on top. That gets you a bad telephone, not a VHS. What makes a real tape convincing is how these faults behave together, how they move over time, and how different one machine and one tape were from the next. Getting all of that to sit together is the hard part, and it's what has taken me years.
How much wear does your audio need?
- Synthwave and lo-fi: a light touch, for the colour of tape without losing the mix.
- Found footage and analog horror: heavy wear. The tape should feel as if it could give out at any moment.
- Home video: a cheap camcorder in a real room, with the machine working hard to keep up.
- A flashback in a film: obvious at the start of the scene, then eased back so people can follow the dialogue.
The short way
Video Tape Emulator 2 is what I built to do all of this. Each fault has its own control, and you can hear it change as you turn it.
- Worn tone
- Hipass and Lopass
- Level control
- Compres
- Off-air squash
- Broadcast
- Headroom
- Input and Clip
- Wobble
- Destable
- Misaligned heads
- Misalign
- Hiss, hum, buzz, pops
- The noise bank
- 50 or 60 Hz mains
- Mains
Hear a before and after
A news report, clean for the first 11 seconds and then through the plugin:
Try it on your own audio
Windows 64-bit VST3 only. No Mac version yet.