C
Chibi Nappa
New member
So, when you say you don't have enough headroom, it means you pushed the fader up as high as it can go and the track is still not loud enough? If that is what you mean, just be aware that is not what headroom is, and you might confuse people.
I can see where you might have problems getting a hot enough signal to outboard analog gear, but there has to be a better way than normalizing each individual track. First of all, if you bring a fader all the way up and you still can't hear it, that might be an indication that every other track has it's fader too high (bring the level of all the other tracks back down). Either that or the one track that you can't hear was not recorded hot enough. You could try re-tracking that one weak track with a limiter on the input to catch any stray peaks and prevent clipping so you can track it hotter. If you must normalize it, just normalize the one track you can't hear instead of normalizing everything. Even better, don't normalize the track at all and try and bring it out with compression at mixdown time.
As far as getting enough signal out to your analog gear, is there a "virtual aux send knob" that you can turn up to send more signal without normalizing the track itself? What kind of analog processing are you doing? Reverb? Delay? Compression? Again, if you absolutly must normalize a track to get enough signal to an outboard until, only normalize the tracks that you have to.
In general, I'd never apply any processing to a track until it has failed without the processing. Even then I might look at re-tracking first. No use in normalizing what doesn't need it. Try at least one mix like that. Hold off any kind of processing at all until something absolutly won't work without it.
I can see where you might have problems getting a hot enough signal to outboard analog gear, but there has to be a better way than normalizing each individual track. First of all, if you bring a fader all the way up and you still can't hear it, that might be an indication that every other track has it's fader too high (bring the level of all the other tracks back down). Either that or the one track that you can't hear was not recorded hot enough. You could try re-tracking that one weak track with a limiter on the input to catch any stray peaks and prevent clipping so you can track it hotter. If you must normalize it, just normalize the one track you can't hear instead of normalizing everything. Even better, don't normalize the track at all and try and bring it out with compression at mixdown time.
As far as getting enough signal out to your analog gear, is there a "virtual aux send knob" that you can turn up to send more signal without normalizing the track itself? What kind of analog processing are you doing? Reverb? Delay? Compression? Again, if you absolutly must normalize a track to get enough signal to an outboard until, only normalize the tracks that you have to.
In general, I'd never apply any processing to a track until it has failed without the processing. Even then I might look at re-tracking first. No use in normalizing what doesn't need it. Try at least one mix like that. Hold off any kind of processing at all until something absolutly won't work without it.
