How To Set Your Gain When Recording

hello and welcome back to the channel today I'm going to be talking all about how loud or at what level should you be recording at to try and get the best sound and I'm not just gonna talk about it I've got loads of experiments and sound demos to show you in just a moment so we're looking at three things how to avoid background noise hiss hum just noise in general you record too quiet and have to boost the gain later is it gonna give you a load of background noise coming through the signal that's basically what we're gonna look at the second thing is how to get the best tone so whether you're recording a vocal or a guitar how'd you get the best tone like what level gives you a really full sound really balanced sound and the third part is to do with confidence which I'll talk about in just a moment so let's get right in and I'll show you what I set up I set up an experiment when I recorded a guitar using two identical microphones two identical cables going into the same interface one with a very high gain one with a very low gain and I was going to use these to run a few little experiments the microphones used are the LeWitt lct 240 Pro which are affordable sort of beginner or budget microphones there are a hundred and thirty-five pounds for the microphone so they're not the cheapest but they are by no means extremely expensive I use the same high quality cables and I ran them into an audience ID 14 interface which again is an affordable interface so we're using good kit but it's not extremely expensive equipment and what I did is I set them as close together as I could and I recorded the same guitar performance one I was driving the preamp kind of at a healthy level and the other was extremely quiet so on my screen here I've got both of those two at the top this was the one with the loud signal this was the one with the quiet signal and they're the same guitar recorded at the same time so let's just take a quick listen to it and then I'll talk to you about how I set up the rest of it [Music] you [Music] so it's a really nice guitar signal and what I use to match loudness was the Yulin loudness meter which is a fantastic this is a really really analytical tool you can download it for free in the description really I would highly recommend it and I used the virtual mix rack as a vu meter so I was recording the first one trying to get around 0v you may be pushing it a little bit more which is about minus 18 DB rms and if you see on the meters here that's roughly what I was getting [Music] so it's a pretty healthy signal and the true Peak max was minus 3.9 DB the signal underneath however was recorded extremely low you can barely see it on the meter and if we take a listen it's barely audible and you know it's maybe at thirty four point five DB and it was barely even touching this vu meter so extremely quiet recording now these experiments are all in these sort of digital worlds if you were recording into analog equipment compressors outboard gear you need to take the gain staging a lot more seriously but this video is more concerned with the digital audio recording and I'll talk about the analog stuff later the idea behind this experiment is that if I leave this top on the same and I boost the gain on this clip below until they match each other perfectly what differences will I hear in the noise and what differences will I hear in the tone so that's precisely what I did I spent quite a while matching them I used the Yulin loudness meter I used the short term integrated and true peak max to make sure they were identical and I used the virtual mix rack just to double-check that they were both hitting around the same vu so now with the matched if I switch between them there isn't really a change in volume at all [Music] but with the matched what's the difference in the noise at the start I had to add 30 DB to this entire track to get it to the same level which means increasing the noise by 30 DB and let's take a listen if we switch between the two it's hard to know if there's really much difference there so what I did is I chopped a bit of the noise from here chop the same bit of the noise from here and I just crossfaded them into each other and I comped the noise together and boosted the gain a bit just so that we could really hear what's going on if I now take this noise into an audio editor like the Edison so I'll just turn on the view here so you can see the noise file and I'm just going to make this full screen so we can really see what's going on if I go into the spectrum mode only somewhere here it switches from the first noise to the second and if there was a big difference one of them would be much darker and the other would be much brighter but if you listen to this I truly cannot hear a difference there is a slight crackle here and a slight crackle here which was just inherent in the audio file but in terms of the background static noise I hear no difference whatsoever and I did check this on my studio monitors as well as these very good headphones and I just like this this result really surprised me I was expecting a huge amount more noise on the second half of the sample and even if I change the display setting to something you know like this I just don't see a difference between the two halves you do see the little crackle here but there's no difference between those two halves the funny thing here is that I went in with a bias I thought that this lower one here would give me a lot more noise and that's what I was expecting to get and I sort of proved myself wrong I guess it seems that when you're using at least decent equipment that the noise doesn't seem to be that much of an issue and the noise is more about how you position the mic and how close you are to the microphone however if you're using a much cheaper microphone say you're 20 30 pounds and a very cheap interface I've experienced a lot more noise so it might well be an issue with those with those pieces of equipment it's something you can do is if you've only got the one mic and interface just record your voice into it very low recording to a high and then just compare them at the same level and see if you notice a difference so the second part of the test was all about the tone so although there the background noise of these two sounds identical to me and I truly believe it is identical what about the tone of the instrument so let's just loop a section and see the difference the top one was the loud one the bottom one here was the one that was recorded very quietly [Music] so right away they definitely do not sound the same they are very similar they're picking up all the same notes and whatnots but there is there is a difference in how full they sound I probably have a bias here but the top one feels more stable to me in some way and the top end doesn't feel as harsh but let me know in the comments what you hear in these two I'm gonna play a little bit more [Music] let's loop just one section [Music] that's really interesting I mean they're both very good guitar tones but I don't feel they're the same there's obviously a lot of qualities that are similar but at least in these headphones I do hear I do hear differences between those two if you also hear any differences please do leave a comment down below and let me know what you hear between the two and also which one you prefer because in a blind test I might not know which one I actually preferred over the other and just to conclude this point many pieces of analog equipment preamps compressors there's often a good range to be in where if you're sort of driving into the piece of equipment at a certain level it sounds quite good but when you're recording digitally into pretty clean neutral preamps like I've got I don't know if there's a one particular spot that sounds better than the next but again all you have to do is just record it a couple of different volumes and see for your own C for your own preamp I quite like driving this preamp pretty hard and just to top off that second point you obviously don't want to drive so hard that you're clipping like this because it really will just sound terrible [Music] that's a surefire way to ruin your recording so I would say use use the gain that you have but give yourself a little bit of headroom and this takes us straight on to the third point which is to do with confidence I used to record pretty low so not this low maybe a little bit like this this is sort of the signal I'd be common to record out with guitars and vocals and what it does is it just an artist looks at it and they say okay well what about all this extra space it doesn't make you look very competent even though it's a perfectly fine signal it just doesn't really make you to look like you know what you're doing and I find that often artists can lose a bit of confidence in your ability or even you can look at it and say you know if your bass tone is this small it's like you kind of you don't believe it's gonna sound full and thick at the end of the day so although it is seemingly unimportant at the end of the day humans we are very visual and whether you like it or not da WS have screens we're going to be looking at them for a very very long time and when I was recording this guitar if the artist can see this nice big waveform it just looks like you're using the tools to the best of their ability whereas if they see this little feeble waveform it doesn't really inspire much confidence and often the best performances come when you are pushing the limits a little bit your being confident bold and you're not afraid to take some risks with it and I find that that always just produces the most artistic the most musical results so don't worry about playing it so safe and as for an exact level to aim for for people that want numbers often people throw around the minus 18 DB rule where they say record at minus 18 DB and what this is really based on is the zero here on a vu meter which is used in the analog world is equivalent to about minus 18 DB RMS which is a way of measuring an average of root-mean-square however when beginners hear the minus 18 often they think that means the peak value so if you record with a minus 18 DB peak value you've just got so much more Headroom that you could have been working with so don't be afraid to push it you know on this example I only had at one point about minus 4 DB of headroom and it was perfectly fine like you you really do have a lot to work with trust your ability to control the instrument control your voice don't clip it but just use what you have be afraid to be bold and confident with it because there's really there's really nothing to lose so in conclusion of the whole video with the noise it seems that if you're using at least decent equipment it doesn't actually matter as much as I thought it did I sort of proved myself wrong with that point but if you are using microphones with a higher self noise definitely try to record a little bit louder so that you're not picking up too much of that later when it comes to the tone try to find a good spot on your audio interface or preamp when you're using outboard analog gear that sort of sweet spot really can matter a lot I find that with the cleaner preamps there's not so much is there's not really one volume where when you just hit that exact volume everything changes and sounds amazing they sort of sound the same across the ranges but from this experiment it's clear to see that these two do not sound the same even though they're recording the same thing and when it comes to confidence I would say it just looks better to have a little bit more of a bold signal a thicker signal it just inspires more confidence in your ability in the artists ability and it can often give you a better result even if sonically they end up sounding absolutely identical so thank you very much for watching I hope that helped and I hope to see you in the next video - bye for now

Channel: In The Mix

Views: 107,602

Keywords: recording, microphone level, best level, pro sound, what level should I record at, what level should you record at for the best sound, noise floor, gain staging, recording gain staging, in the mix, wh, recording gain, best levels, mixing, recording levels

Id: g9kEekgKdqE

Length: 11min 41sec (701 seconds)

Published: Sat May 25 2019