Problem with guitar recordings

V

venndi

New member
Hello!

I use Reaper with amplitube3 for guitar recordings. My problem is, that the recorded voice is too quiet, and when I add a little more volume with master track, then will my speaker crackling, of course becouse the volume is too high on master track. What can I do?
The guitar is too quiet beside addictive drums, so I must always turn it down the volume of the drum tracks.
My interface is scarlett 2i4, I use it with ASIO driver. The played guitar voice is much better, than the recorded guitar voice, when I hear back.
Sorry for bad english.
 
+1. You shouldn't have either track very loud at all. The high volume is the cause of the clipping. What you want to do is keep the volume of the tracks low in reaper and turn up your speakers. Once you have a finished track you will want to master it to raise the volume of the song to a normal level.
 
You want to record your vocals where they hit somewhere in the yellow. I myself stay in the green, at about -12. You then want the drums turned down, you do not want them defaulting at 0.0 and that's what the drum tracks are doing because midi will default at 0.0 if you don't tell it not to.

Then when you finish the song, you want to bring it back up to 0.0, what you do is add something to your master output knob. You'll want to add a compressor so some parts aren't too loud and some parts aren't too soft, but don't over compress.

Then ad something like an ad limiter, gain, or you can just use a compressor plug in that also has a gain knob and limiter built in. Limit it, so it will not go above 0.0 no matter what. And then turn the gain up to where it's loud, but not distorted. This is done after you mix the tracks.

Once you learn more, you'll want to add a compressor to not only the final track like that, but also to your vocal track in the channel strip. That will also bring your volume up if you want it to. But don't use that one to bring the volume up, unless it's massively different than the the drums. Use the main output to bring the volume up.

Or you can send all of your vocal tracks to Bus 1. Send them to it 100%. Put the compressor or gain or limiter on that bus and it will add it to all the vocal tracks at once. For example if you want the same reverb on all vocals but don't want to put it on every vocal track, you can just route it to a bus and put the reverb on the bus.
 
Proper gain staging will help you a lot.
Be aware of the recorded tracks input out put levels.
For guitar and vocals I would stay somewhere between-20/-10db
And once you have your drum track converted to audio. That's the time to mix them and adjust the levels.
I don't believe compression will answer your problem as suggested.
You will likely need some compression on the drum tracks but not to use it to compensate for poor recording levels with the output gain on the compressor.
IMO compression should be discrete and transparent.
I hope you get sorted soon.
It takes a while to master recording levels.
Even longer to master mixing. I won't even go to mastering as I can't do it for toffee.
Have fun and experiment.
As for the guitar sounding different after recording, I would advise you to listen rather to the monitor of the recorded guitar than the guitar in the room.
Your ears take advantage of the entire recording space where as the microphone capsule has a very different perspective. So you can see/hear how things may sound different when recorded.
Set up your mic and monitor it, repositioning the mic if you wish before recording.
Play a small part and press the red button.
Play it back listening on your monitor speakers( turn the mic down/off)
Not happy with the sound try repositioning the mic and so on.
Happy days.
Rich
 
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