Didn't someone write a song "dithering the day away"?

I'm finding this discussion fascinating. I still wonder then why all the advice from all these pros about recording at such low levels? I completely believe you guys that it's fine to record as hot as is appropriate for a particular part and simply adjust the faders for mixing. I threw out my comment about resampling or whatever just as a guess but apparently that's not it either.

I just did an experiment in RB. Starting with a new blank project I put in one chord on bar one then in track view highlighted the first 12 bars. I then generated a rock Real Drum part and it generated very low, I got one bar at the bottom of the VU meter about -24db. Then I generated a strong RT guitar track, a Brent Mason solo and it came in at -18, much louder on the meter. Now here's where a problem can be, the edit window shows individual peaks at 0 for the drums and -3 for the guitar but that is not reflected in the VU meters. They never went above -18 or -24 and that's where the recording person has to know what they're doing because I saw the exact same thing on my live remote band sessions using my Akai HD recorder. These meters are not sensitive enough. Another example of getting bit by consumer level gear and not pro level gear. I'm sure there's remote equipment with good meters that cost triple what I paid.

These levels that RB generated for guitar and drums are exactly correct per these websites so RB is doing it right. For drums RB is making sure the peaks are not going above zero even though that makes the overall track almost inaudible because the dynamic range on live drums is so high. This is also why a lot of live recordists put a compressor on the drum inputs. I never did, I just applied compression later. RB "knows" that as far as raw tracks are concerned an engineer doesn't want any manipulation going on the he didn't specifically ask for.

In conclusion to all this for Eddie, if you've already laid down some live tracks like your vocals, keyboards and sax and then have RB generate new tracks don't get upset that RB is generating them too low, understand it's actually doing it right. You need to first turn up your monitoring system and then use the mixer faders to pull down your prerecorded tracks, not manipulate the new ones up. At least not yet. A good engineer is going to want to hear what those new tracks sound like in the mix with no changes at first, just raw. Then he'll decide what to do, apply compression, EQ, all of that stuff. And for the future record your live tracks lower to avoid this. In other words follow RB's lead, it turns out Jeff knows what he's doing. And, it looks like I just answered my question at the beginning of this post.

I have to say these discussion with me throwing in some correct stuff and getting others wrong, I've learned a lot.

Bob

Last edited by jazzmammal; 10/26/12 01:36 PM.
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