Lead Vocal Levels Question (PC Multitracking)

[mark4man]

My primary drive & OS are beginning to crap out; & my sound card's hdwe effects are becoming unstable (that is...I think the two are related, but if not, I'm swapping drives anyway; & upgrading to XP.) I need to complete & upload one tune to my site prior to this task; & normally the method I would use to add presence to the lead vocal is double-tracking. In trying to accomplish this now tho, with weird reverb, instead of the two duplicate vocal tracks adding to the gain, I just get clipping. So, my question is: Can I go with one good vocal track, drop the gain on everything else; & then normalize to get back to 0db, without loosing bit depth; & in turn audio quality, on the lower volume tracks? I have read that: the hotter the signal, the greater the bit depth; & hence the higher the quality of the sound...& conversely, lower quality sound for tracks recorded with a weaker gain. Thanks.

mark4man

 

[littledog]

Maybe I'm not understanding the question, but why don't you drop the gain on the original vocal, and then when you double track it, the combined vocals will be about as loud as the original and won't clip?

Otherwise, by all means bring the faders down on other tracks as well if that's what it takes, and then remix. With compression and limiting, you can get the final mix as loud as you need to.

 

[mark4man]

littledog,

I know I can do all that. I want to know if it causes a reduction in quality of the tracks with lower gain.

MF

 

[littledog]

While i understand the concern on a 16 bit system to maintain "hot" levels, if your current track levels are resulting in clipping and "crapping out", I don't see how anything you do to get rid of those artifacts could be considered "reducing the quality".