Now that I have my raw tracks assembled in RB, is it best to first bring each audio track up to it's peak amplitude in order to have the hottest signal to work with and then manipulate the WAV as you see fit during the mix? What do you do?
Thanks.
Doug in Perth

Doug,

I'd leave a bit of headroom for the final mix. If you bring all tracks up to maximum, when you render them to the final mix, volumes are additive (although not linearly) and you could end up with distortion. If you plan on boosting them, I'd boost them to around -5 or -6 dB and render from there. This will allow you room to maneuver in the rendered output.

Regards,
Noel

Thanks Noel. That makes sense.

Check out the Mixing and Mastering tutorial from one of our posters.

http://rsthigpen.com/free/

R

Dtravz,

There are many ways to go about this. There is really no reason to jack up the levels of individual tracks before going to a mix down stage if you have no intention of those tracks being anywhere near those levels in the final mix.

Here's a tip to prep for mixing before you even start tracking: If your soundcard has the ability, record audio tracks at 24 bit depth.

Make sure that you have a decent signal to noise ratio of your individual tracks during your recording process. As you monitor your input signals see that you are getting at least half-way through your VU meters as read at the computer in RB. If you have that, with 24 bit depth, then you can dial down the mixed levels and still be in a great fidelity zone with each of the individual tracks. Going from 16 bit to 24 bit is an extra 48 dB of level quantization signal to noise ratio. A rather dry and academic description of what this means can be found on this Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantization_(signal_processing)

Rather than bore the readers here with a description of this, just think of it this way - with 24 bit recordings, you don't have to be an ace at getting the gain stages set just right, though it doesn't hurt to learn about this. Used to be that one would really work hard on getting the max signal in a song for a track to maybe clip red once on the VU meters, with most peaks just entering the yellow zone. Just get it near yellow with 24 bit, and you are doing fine. Keep as much unnecessary gear out of the input signal chain as possible to keep electrical noise to a minimum.

I have to be honest, with my home recordings, I almost don't do a final mix as a practice. I'm usually constructing songs on the fly and mixing as I go along adding tracks. Once I'm done with my final track, I might do a quickie mix check, but that's about it. I've kind of mixed the levels as I constructed the song. I'll work on fades and pans and other post effects (EQ, reverb sends and such) in mixdown. But I don't leave level mixing for the end. I can't do it any other way because it's hard for me to track along a new track, if my other tracks are at unnatural relative levels.

Hopefully this makes some sense.

-Scott

Yeah, I find it much better to work with the wav as recorded, and then where needed, use the GAIN CHANGE function.
Thanks guys.

I'd suggest buying geting a 24-bit high density converter, like my Behringer Ultradyne-Pro 9024. They specifically are no longer produced by Behringer...but there are used ones out there and they make "finalizing" before mastering, with auto channel compression features, a breeze. Look up the specs on the old, but groovey piece of hardware. I know producers that bought them like Baker's Dozens, they were so cheap for the results they produced. Wish I had more than one, but I did six CD's in very short order, thanks to the 9024!! There are other brands out there, but they cost a studio-arm-and-a-leg!!