By: Joe Gilder

There are a lot of things to focus on during a tracking session, especially when you’re recording a dozen or more inputs at once. You want to make sure you’re getting a good sound from each microphone. That’s step one. (You’ll spend the rest of your recording life perfecting step one.)

I want to focus on step two – getting good levels.

When I first started recording, I was taught that you want to get the level as close to peaking as humanly possible without going into the red. I would keep cranking up the mic pre on the snare drum mic until it was pixels away from clipping.

What happened? Everything clipped, of course. Apparently musicians play louder during the actual take than they do during sound check.

he reason people tend to think that you need to really “peg” the meters is leftover from the analog days. The harder you hit tape, the better the recording would sound. If you had lower levels, the tape noise would become much too audible.

Today, however, just about everyone is recording a 24-bit digital signal. Digital signals don’t sound better when you turn them up, they simply get louder. If you record the same track REALLY close to the clip light and then again with plenty of headroom, you won’t notice a difference in the quality of the signal, only the volume.

Analog equipment tends to saturate and add color the harder you drive it. Digital systems do not.

Give yourself some room to breathe! Rather than trying to make the signal get as close to the top of the meter as possible, have it max out somewhere between one-half and three-fourths of the way up the meter.

Read the rest of this post at Home Studio Corner

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 1:40 pm and is filed under Music Production, Wisdom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.