Tips & Tricks

Set Recording Levels Correctly (Part 1)

If you are like most people, including me, you grew up with enough experience on analog boards to know that you set your levels so that the meters just barely peaked, very occasionally hitting the red. In other words, the signal was good and hot. Enter digital recording. Meters look like meters, and we all assume that you set the levels where you always set the levels.

However... in this new digital world, problems arose, digital clipping sounded horrible, and we were all left wondering what was going wrong. Where the heck do I really set my levels?

Chris Cavell, a mastering engineer at Cavell Studios, offered a fabulous write-up on this problem at the Digidesign User Conference

It is worth a read to get the historical perspective and understand why we all think we were doing it right, but are not. Read on.

Okay... I'll try to break it down...

1) Once upon a time there was this thing that our ancestors used to use called analog... and it was discovered that analog distortion could be a pretty creative tool. These mythical engineers of yore started experimenting with all kinds of analog distortion and found that some types really worked well for certain styles of music and production. It became common practice in Rock to hit the tape “hot.” The tape would saturate, somewhat distorting and compressing the signal that was tracked... and for certain music and mixes, this was the perfect sound, the sound they wanted.

2) Time passed... bubble gum pop gave way to RAWK... whose side-effects ended up being long hair, and "gateway" drug abuse, which led to cocaine OD's, which in turn led to the dark age of music: Disco. Some good came of disco though... synths were developed further than they had before, and digital technology was on the horizon. Soon we began the long arduous climb out of the disco pits, passed up another long hair phase, rediscovered the worth of good songwriters for a short while in the eighties, got really depressed at how long all this was taking in the early 90's, and eventually wound up back on track with one hit wonder crappy music (the music industry's bread and butter) coinciding with the bane of digital audio devices, the ADAT.

The ADAT had some awfully crappy converters, and at the time, the only people that could afford a fully-fledged setup had to sell the analog tape decks that had become really good at using. So, they approached the ADAT with the same techniques, and discovered that if you pushed things too hot, it sounded downright awful! (digital distortion), but if you went in too quiet, things sounded equally bad with noise floor distortion and awful dynamic range thanks to these ultra crappy converters. The solution at the time was simple: put a compressor or limiter just before the converter. If it was a good compressor or limiter, you could even push it hard like you did with tape to get a saturated sound that worked with some types of musical production.

Occasionally though, something would still skip through and clip you digitally... and this was a big problem... because the system was completely linear, filled with latency issues, and therefore nearly impossible (without a lot of manual labor) to edit on.

3) Time passes, and in pops Digidesign (and a couple other companies) realizing just how useful it would be to develop this nifty new tool that had caught on, the computer, to make a non-linear editing system where such editing deficiencies could be overcome with relative ease. It caught on... overnight there were a slew of companies designing ever better and better digital converters... and eventually a new standard was born: 24 bit ultra low noise floor converters. It was fantastic, these new devices could capture such a huge range of audio that not even microphones, pre's, or the human ear could fill up or interpret all the data it could contain. This was great news... because now you COULD record to tape (now to disc) at conservative enough levels to keep from EVER clipping digitally, and the noise floor was so low that you never lost anything from the quiet end of the sound.

EUREKA!!!

4) Technology BOOM!!! leads to loads of people completely uneducated about the intricacies and reasoning behind the recording practices of yore getting some incredibly capable gear in their hands at ever lower prices... and they don't know how to use it... so who do they ask? The veterans, and the veterans, not using any of this new-fangled stuff, wisely waiting for it to prove itself, or simply justifying the super expensive analog stuff they purchased a short while ago, or the studio they’re in justifying the purchase of a full fledged ADAT setup (ugh... but true enough), explain to these kids how THEY do it on THEIR setups. Suddenly, we have a lot of people who know what they're doing telling a lot of people who don't (and don't want to know WHY you do something... they just want to know HOW the PROS do it with pipe dreams of making the “big time”) lead to a ton of misconceptions and awful myths swamping the newly created consumer level audio production market. Hence, the problem you're encountering...

To fix this problem (which we encounter on a minute-by-minute basis on the Internet forums), it takes a keen interest in WHY something is done over HOW something is done on the part of the learner... it takes a lot of reading, study, and education, formal or informal, that goes beyond learning a technique and delves into the reasons behind the use of the technique. It takes UNDERSTANDING of the technology and its uses, not just knowledge OF the technology and its uses.

All that said, there are some great resources for those serious enough about engineering (that word used to have a very literal meaning as it pertains to audio... not anymore, and that needs to be remedied). Check out Bob Katz website and books, pick up a copy of Modern Recording Techniques and read it cover to cover, and check out Dan Lavry's papers, as well as Digital Audio Explained : For The Audio Engineer by Nika Aldrich.

Study.
Understand.
Practice.