Mixing - Drums

[auggybendoggy2]

So I loaded in Oasis' song Supersonic because it opens with just drums. I wanted to look at the meter and see where it falls.

Interesting about pros, they seem to get more volume out with less decibels. I also downloaded a audio mixing project (wav files) and set all drums to solo to see where they fall. Dismal.

One thing I'm noticing - Oasis' recording seems to be EQ'd in a way that allows it to be heard. I'm guessing this is a major difference when signals match on the meter but one is easily heard (or perceived to be louder).

The other thing is...the glue. I'm starting to wonder, if tracks are glued via compression in such a way, then leaving headroom on each track allows them to glue it better to be taken to a master where a mastering colsone/plugin can be used like one. I noticed One seems to make things louder while increasing the decibels very very little. Must be something to do with dynamics.

Just thinking out loud here.

My hunch is leaving headroom when first recording is important rather than recording a track maxed out near 0 db.

[carlaz]

As far as I understand things, when recording digitally to a DAW, there's little advantage in super-hot recordings. In the all-analogue world, there was a lot more noise, and recording hot both helped overcome the noise issue and would often overdrive/saturate transformers, tubes, tape, etc. in ways that produced musically pleasing harmonics. This is definitely not the case in the digital world, where "0 means 0", and going past that usually means musically non-pleasing digital clipping.

I have no real experience in the analogue world, but what I read is that those of us recording digitally should treat ‑18dBFS as the equivalent of 0VU on an analogue system; i.e. that's where the average signal level should hover around (i.e. a bit a above or a bit below) most of the time. Of course, peaks (particularly from things like drums) may go well past ‑18dBFS, but as long as nothing goes past 0VU, one is in theory OK. Because there is a lot less noise in the digital realm, one should be able to record with a healthy degree of headroom. If you clip going in to the DAW, then you've clipped; but in theory (and in a floating-point DAW), if you have a relatively low-level signal, you can gain it up successfully in a way that you might not be able to if it had been recorded on tape (because you'd be turning up the tape hiss, too, etc.).

I've seen videos with some pro guys who go into their DAWs surprisingly (to me) hot, though I guess that is force of habit from their analogue days. I suppose if you have enough experience and know what you're doing, then you can live a little closer to the edge and things will sound much less nasty than if, say, I were trying to do the same.