Music Production Made Easy: Recording and Mixing
Posted on April 9th, 2009. Filed under: Music.You require to ensure that all of the songs you record will be playing back at the appropriate volume for the listener. To start with, set your monitor level. Listening to a song that you are familiar with would help. Be sure it’s a zero peaking song. Have it at the level its meant to be at. An enjoyable listening level. Once you are at this stage, dont change the monitor levels but instead adjust the master track of the song you are working on. Its suppose to sound at a suitable level for listening. Then check the meter levels to ensure they are not on over-load. If it’s on over load then consider having a limit rather than turning the level down. Make a note of the level setting thats on the monitor. You’ll have this in future to relate to.
Try to bear in mind that its not how high you get the volume to, but the quality of the volume that’ll make the recording a success. Ideally, it would be to record the level of the instrument that it is meant to go to not beyond its means. Technology is a wondrous tool but it doesn’t win common sense and instinct.
Remember that you don’t need to record at the max volume. Several people would argue then why is it necessary to have a sixteen bit dynamic range it you are not going to utilise it. A come back to that remark will be why bother trying to record the cabasa at exactly 16 bits when it is never going to represent more than twelve bits anyway.
A few other issues of not wanting to have the sound cranked up to max is in the event youve to use a favorite. These are not exactly user friendly when having to be used at low level. Nonetheless if you record at logical and practical levels you can avoid unnecessary time consuming worries such as these.
You can end up with various big mixing problems if you’re utilizing an analogue mixing desk long with something like hi-hat recorded at maximum, on digital multitrack. If a few of the items are always peaking at 0 then when turned off, you’ll still hear them in the background. This is in reference to items like hi-hats, cabasas or cymbals for example
In this case, you should not be surprised to find every of that electrical leakage being reverb on the hi hat, as merely one cause. Items like bass drum and snare drum are meant to be played loudly but not the top kit items or the quiet instruments.
What im trying to say is to remember to find the reasonable levels. From there you have various leverage to work with, either up or down as the situation or sound or instrument dictates. In the very end, you’re going to end up with a superior piece of recording. After all music is all about sound.