My setup is pretty embarrassing, actually, and for this EP it was worse than usual. I ran my guitar into my laptop via a total of three aux cables, one of them cheap and a good seven years old (it actually came from an iDog, whenever they were a thing), the others $2 each and freshly bought. All the adapters I had were fiddly and had to be in a very specific position or they'd generate a whole heap of noise, so I was basically still for the entire recording. So the tapey quality is pretty much just noise from all that. I do stuff with vox occasionally, but my voice isn't so good, so I'm looking at getting a singer in.
Don't knock it, man- sounds awesome. Sometimes a song is defined and improved by its limitations and eccentricities rather than all the fancy shit you might have at your disposal. First group of songs I ever made, I spent hours trying to get the hiss out of the recordings. Now I spend hours trying to get it back in. Go figure.
Yeah, this is true. It would be nice to have a bit more control, though, to be able to take out the hiss where I don't want it. Though putting hiss back in is rather a bitch. There's some stuff with vox on my soundcloud that I'm actually pretty okay with. East Hastings has a really small amount that I think work quite nicely.