Getting tracks to a workable volume level

Sax2

Sax2

Punk
I'm trying to do the whole "gain staging" thing right and leave myself plenty of headroom while I'm recording, but whenever I record my acoustic drums, the tracks are hella quiet. I know that it's gonna be quieter than a commercial recording, but it's so quiet that I need to boost it a lot just to work with it, even when I crank the headphones knob on my interface (can't afford monitors yet, I'm getting there). Up until this point I've just been slapping compression on it without much thought and boosting the output by a huge amount (usually around 30 dB), but now I'm thinking that may be affecting my sound, and I wanna try some alternatives to see if I can get better results.

So, advice?
 
Whenever I record I try to set the mic levels so the drums peak around -10, it might be a wee bit higher than that though, maybe up to -8, for some silly reason Audiobox VSL doesn't display numbers, just a bar...
 
Don't screw with your DAW recording or playback levels just to solve a hardware problem. Probably a different set of headphones or a headphone amp would get you enough monitoring volume to hear your drums. Also check that any software level controls (like in the control panel for the interface) are at their default settings.
 
Sax2 said:
Whenever I record I try to set the mic levels so the drums peak around -10, it might be a wee bit higher than that though, maybe up to -8, for some silly reason Audiobox VSL doesn't display numbers, just a bar...
Click to expand...

I too find the omission of meter numbers in DAW software to be a daft nuisance! Cubase is the same (tho' I think this can be turned on?) . Audacity will give you some fairly basic metering but the bees knees is Sony Soundforge 30day demo..Scrummy! Samplitude Silver has pretty good meters and is free.

But I am with BSG. You have something out of whack in your monitoring chain. How loud is a CD or a Youtube track?

Dave.
 
With drums, you can push the peaks to up around -6dbfs and still have a little safely margin, but -10dbfs shouldn't be so quiet that you can't work with it. I agree, you either need a better headphone amp or headphones that are louder in general.
 
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