Hi -
I have been wrestling with getting a nice, present snare sound with my digital setup. Unfortunately, everywhere I've looked for advice either talks about saturating tape which I don't have, or that digital distortion is to be avoided like the plague.
Therein lies my problem.
I use a single SM57 to record the snare (have tried a bunch of different positions) this goes straight into an Onyx, and from there to a delta 1010 and then audition on the 'puter. The transient clips, so I lower the gain on the Onyx. Now the transient doesn't clip but the entire track is too quiet. I hesitate to use my rack compressor because I've read that recording 24/96 digital gives enough to get a full image without doing so (this confuses me).
But when I do compress this is my signal chain:
mic -> onyx -> compressor -> delta 1010
And, unfortunately, the wave form is still clipping the transients even when by all metering on the onyx and compressor it should not be.
I've torn my hair out tweaking the tons of settings at my disposal but I can't seem to find a good balance between non-clipping transients and non-quiet everything else. I don't actually hear any distortion, I just see the waveform clearly clipping at the transients.
The compressor is a dbx 166XL. Perhaps my settings are wrong on it? Everything coming out of the compressor seems correct but it still is not pulling the transient of the snare down enough on the waveform. And again it still bugs me that I read that I shouldn't "need" the compressor to record a non-clipping, non-quiet signal.
Should this beasty transient be ignored? Should I be using a pad? Should I leave the recording as is and be using compression AFTER the wave is recorded?
Thanks in advance for any advice or for pointing me towards where I can learn about this.
I have been wrestling with getting a nice, present snare sound with my digital setup. Unfortunately, everywhere I've looked for advice either talks about saturating tape which I don't have, or that digital distortion is to be avoided like the plague.
Therein lies my problem.
I use a single SM57 to record the snare (have tried a bunch of different positions) this goes straight into an Onyx, and from there to a delta 1010 and then audition on the 'puter. The transient clips, so I lower the gain on the Onyx. Now the transient doesn't clip but the entire track is too quiet. I hesitate to use my rack compressor because I've read that recording 24/96 digital gives enough to get a full image without doing so (this confuses me).
But when I do compress this is my signal chain:
mic -> onyx -> compressor -> delta 1010
And, unfortunately, the wave form is still clipping the transients even when by all metering on the onyx and compressor it should not be.
I've torn my hair out tweaking the tons of settings at my disposal but I can't seem to find a good balance between non-clipping transients and non-quiet everything else. I don't actually hear any distortion, I just see the waveform clearly clipping at the transients.
The compressor is a dbx 166XL. Perhaps my settings are wrong on it? Everything coming out of the compressor seems correct but it still is not pulling the transient of the snare down enough on the waveform. And again it still bugs me that I read that I shouldn't "need" the compressor to record a non-clipping, non-quiet signal.
Should this beasty transient be ignored? Should I be using a pad? Should I leave the recording as is and be using compression AFTER the wave is recorded?
Thanks in advance for any advice or for pointing me towards where I can learn about this.