Useing a peak limiter while recording drums

[cominginsecond]

curious.....do larger studios always use limiters on the drums when first recording? OR do they record at lower levels and use software and hardware compressors after to bring up the volume of the tracks?

A lot of pros compress the individual drums on the way into the recorder, and then, sometimes, even afterward. Very few pros compress the overheads.

 

[mixsit]

Now 2 RNC's, chained, might be fast enough to be used as a peak limiter.

Don't know for sure, but I'd bet the that the second one would still have the too-little too-late respose.
But....
How 'bout making your own Look-Ahead circuit?
Mult the line, one goes directly to the side chain input, the other goes through a good digital delay set -1 ms.
You'd still have to watch your input levels into the delay but thats no problem (you got 144 db to play with) but now at least we could record nice and HOT.

Wayne

It's a joke, right.

 

[mixsit]

So what is a good limiter??

A hardware Waves L2.

But here, again, we have those pesky conversion levels to tend to.

(Still just having some fun with this here folks...

I used the 'Peak Stop's on the 166's for years on snares without too much signal losses. But then again some said that Anything I ran through a 166 had signal losses.
Wayne

 

[fenix]

Re: Re: really?

Recording at 24bit, you do not need to record superhot.

This is a little less true than you think. Sure you don't need to record as hot as say 16 bit because you have more headroom, but I would advise not sending a weak signal to the recorder. Get it as hot as you can without clipping. The lower the signal while recording 24 bit, the more audible distortion you will have when you dither to 16 bit.

 

[fenix]

I used the 'Peak Stop's on the 166's for years on snares without too much signal losses. But then again some said that Anything I ran through a 166 had signal losses.
Wayne

For the money, those peak stops on those units really aren't that bad.

 

[Middleman]

curious.....do larger studios always use limiters on the drums when first recording? OR do they record at lower levels and use software and hardware compressors after to bring up the volume of the tracks?

Anything is possible but yeah limiters are used on tracking for drums. Just to control the peaks, not excessively. Compressing at tracking can also be done but tends to suck the life out of things. Most of the drums I hear today are lightly limited to save dynamics and then later compressed and gated in the mix.

The goal is to keep as many dynamics until the mix. Then you can choose to squash or not squash based on the feel of the music.

 

[keilson]

I'm just trying to decide which way to do it. I had been recording drums and making sure that the loudest hits wouldn't peak by lowering the levels. Then I would compress and gate after in Cubase SX. Do you think it's better to limit beforehand?

 

[Abelskeeper]

I seem to have problems with the snare peaking into the red myself. I have the Roland 2480, to avoid most of the harder hits from peaking, and then it's still hard, I end up recording the drums at -4, all of them. I record at 24 bits also. I would love to have a good limiter with 8 channels. I record 8 drum tracks at a time plus a room mic setup recording a stereo track.

Terry

 

[chessrock]

A hardware Waves L2.

But here, again, we have those pesky conversion levels to tend to.

(Still just having some fun with this here folks...

I used the 'Peak Stop's on the 166's for years on snares without too much signal losses. But then again some said that Anything I ran through a 166 had signal losses.
Wayne

The hardware Waves L2 is good, but very expensive. The Ahpex dominator can usually be found on ebay in the $500 range or so -- a very nice peak limiter, and reasonably priced.

The 166 can be pretty nasty. The peakstop PLUS on some of the other dbx units is supposed to be a small improvement, as are some of the older Symetrix 501's.

 

[crosstudio]

why would you go through all of the trouble of using a limiter during recording to catch a few transients when you can go into your software and pull those few peaks down by hand?

then you don't have to worry about how good/bad your outboard or software limiter is.