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In this movie, I will be making three test recordings for later analysis. Part of the trick of getting good quality digital recordings is having a great microphone, a transparent microphone preamp and a pristine, analog-to-digital or A/D converter. An acoustically beautiful and ambient recording room helps quite a bit as well. However, none of that will matter if you don't set your recording levels properly. This is true no matter what your signal chain is from the outside world in to the virtual world of Pro Tools LE. Some of the most revered recordings were done with what would be considered today as crappy equipment. But it was used by someone who knew what they were doing especially when setting levels. So it didn't matter quite as much. I have a pair of studio projects C4 microphones connected to my favorite mic preamplifier, an Avalon 2022 and from there I have a connection to my Digi002Rack. I could just as easily have connected my microphone directly to my Digi002Rack. For this session, I will use the A/D converters that are built into the Digi002. For this first test, I am going to purposefully under power my microphone preamplifier, so that the signal leaving it is quite anemic. The amplification knob is as low as you can get and I have a 20db cut turned on which will kill the signal even more. The loudest parts of what I am about to play on my martin guitar are not going to be much higher than the noise floor of my Digi002. This will be an extreme example of poor level setting and not only will you get to see what inadequate levels look like on the signal meter, you will also get to hear the tragic results in the next movie. For the next test, I am going to overdrive the signal into the Digi002 from my Avalon preamp. I will remove the 20db cut and I will crank the signal level to about 28db higher than it was. Essentially increasing the signal to the Digi002 by about 48db or about 250 times as loud as it was before. Watch the meters clip red and the waveform start to look like an on/off switch. If I were recording this guitar into an Mbox at these levels, I would be watching the clip LED on the front shine like Rudolf's nose. It's going to be ugly. See how even good equipment can sound like crap if you try to drive it too hard. You may initially think that this kind of distortion sounds cool man until you hear good harmonic distortion by comparison like from a guitar two band. This stuff is in harmonic and it's just playing harsh. Ok, let me pull me back a bit on the preamp to a more reasonable amount of amplification. Right now I am about halfway between the first recording where I was way too quiet and the most recent one where I was louder than shaving cream, if you know what I mean. Watch where my meters tend to hover and where they tend to peak or where the thin horizontal green lines hang around for a few seconds as this solid green bar goes up and down with the recording level. Did you notice how I never even approached the red clip area? That was intentional. If there's one thing I know about electronics, it's that undesirable distortion increases as you approach its operation envelope. Because of this, I tend to under drive my electronics by about 6db in order to obtain a cleaner signal. Not only that, but you can't always trust digital clip meters. Just because the red clipping meter is not lighting up like a Christmas tree when you get near it, doesn't mean you aren't clipping. Some clip meters are keyed off the wrong information. Don't take a chance with this. Keep your signal peaks at least 3 to 6db away from the clipping point. Once you clip, you begin to lose signal. It's similar to over exposing a photograph. You can never regain lost detail.
Course: | Digidesign Pro Tools LE 6 |
Author: | Nathan Dickson |
SKU: | 33599 |
ISBN: | 1-932808-46-9 |
Release Date: | 2005-02-25 |
Duration: | 9 hrs / 101 lessons |
Work Files: |
Yes |
Captions: | No |
Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |