FD-4 vocals over-driving?

carlcheney

New member
I've been recording vocals in best mode with an FD-4 and an AKG C1000s mic. The sound is great for the most part, but I have to record at a very low level to avoid rough/scratchy sounding highs and louder vocal parts. It seems the unit gets over-driven? I'm wondering if it is just a limitation of the recorder? I've pulled vocals farther from the mic but then I lose sound quality.

I've started experimenting with recording through the FD-4 to a PC with a basic sound card at 16-bit, 44khz, but I've not been able to tell at this point whether it helps with the overdrive problem. Any ideas would be much appreciated.
Thanks.
 
Vocals often have a wide dynamic range in terms of volume. You may want to soften out those loud distorted spikes by recording through a compressor. This will turn the volume down when the singer reaches a given threshold level and let the softer parts throuh unprocessed. This way you can get a better signal-to-noise ratio without those annoying distorted peaks. But you'll have to record the vocals all over again coz once your recordings are distorted there's not much you can do about it afterwards.
 
Logik is right--compression on vocals is pretty vital, especially on digital recorders. If you go above 0 db on the meters its going to get distorted, there is no mercy in the digital domain. So compress, but not so heavy that you lose your dynamics altogether.

Peace, Jim
 
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