You gain nothing from tracking that loud since there is no real noise floor to overcome. Don’t Go There PeopleĪll of this discussion brings be to the point at hand: please, whatever you do, don’t record your tracks so hot that they are even close to clipping in your recording software. The computer crushes the signal giving you a metallic and horrible sound. In fact, that little clip light in your DAW is the end of the line for your audio.
Unfortunately for us in the digital world, computer software doesn’t give us “warm” saturation when we clip. In fact, it’s been called “warm” by audio people because that is very much how the human ear perceives the subtle effect of analog saturation. Why? The hotter you pushed the console and hit the tape, the more likely you were to get saturation (compression) that sounded pleasing. Recording as “hot as you could without clipping” was perfectly suitable advice for those recording to through consoles and to tape.
These days with a simple digital home studio we have a super quiet noise floor so this is practically a non issue. The goal was to record your levels loud enough that your signal to noise ratio was high and you wouldn’t hear much of that noise in the final product. In the days of recording to tape there was so much noise that the engineers were fighting against. Two things that are very different in digital than in analog are the noise floor and clipping. Technique is everything, the medium might change, but philosophy of recording doesn’t. Nothing about mic placement, arrangement, room acoustics, performance, and effects has really changed in the digital world.Īudio is audio and sound is sound, and the great engineers of the last 50 years still know what they are talking about and we would do well to pay attention to how these masters of their craft captured the sounds that they did. Now, most of what we know of great recording technique comes from the analog world, and it’s really helpful. The confusion is rooted in old analog workflows that simply don’t carry over into the digital world. That’s right, many of you are recording signals that are way too loud, giving you worse sound and for no real reason. If you are recording in a modern home studio comprised of a computer, an audio interface, and software, then one of the simplest things you could do to make your tracks sound better is to stop recording so hot into your DAW.
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