Ok, so I've been present at a number of colleges, music wotnots, uni courses etc etc and one thing I constantly see people doing is to try and get signals into their computers as hot as possible (as close to 0 without clipping as they can)

Please don't!!!

I'm not sure why these so called "music courses" teach in this way as it's completely wrong and it leaves the person mixing or mastering the track with nowhere to go.

Music dynamics is all about having "room" in your mix, that is, make sure theres enough space left after you've done your recording for the person mixing it (me) to be able to utilise this "headroom" to get the best from your sound.

Ever wondered why theres such a big argument over why mixes don't sound as good in the computer etc etc blah blah and "tape is so much better"

The reason being that on a traditional analogue mixing desk, when you get to 0 on the desk, you still have a good bit left to go over and above that magical number because analogue distortion is nothing like digital distortion.

if you set an analogue desk to be just touching 0 on input and then route your signal out to a daw (digital audio workstation) you will normally (working on the assumption that the desk is calibrated correctly) see roughly -20 rms and -12 ish peaks on the recordings.

This way, when it comes to mixing and mastering your work, the engineer will still have enough bit depth (getting geeky now) and headroom left over to make the most of any processing that he/she does.

There's a huge thread on the subject over at Gearslutz for anyone who's got the time and is interested enough to read it.

Anyway, the point of the blog is.....


try and leave enough headroom when tracking(recording) your work so that us as engineers can make it sound as good as possible for you the artist.

Cheers,

Andy.

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