Is normalizing Vocals ALWAYS a good idea?

[sjs94704]

In one of the many videos on YouTube (unfortunately I don't remember which one) I thought I heard the guy say that normalizing is not always such a good idea.

Any thoughts regarding when it is/isn't a good idea?

[Judders]

I never normalise.

he only situation where I would find it useful would be batch processing lots of random audio from disparate sources with the same processing.

[Tod]

Originally Posted by sjs94704

In one of the many videos on YouTube (unfortunately I don't remember which one) I thought I heard the guy say that normalizing is not always such a good idea.

Any thoughts regarding when it is/isn't a good idea?

I don't think it's necessarily good or bad to normalize, but I see no reason to do so, it's rather radical and does nothing to improve the sound.

There are many other ways to adjust the gain of the audio items without processing them, too many to list them all here.

That's what I think.

[sjs94704]

I appreciate it!

[Jason Lyon]

Steve.
If I recall, you're just starting to produce some of your vocals over backing tracks, right?
Don't worry about normalising anything. Just get the mix sounding good to you for now. I've a feeling you're trying to run before you can walk...
Obviously you want to do your best, but this stuff comes with time and experience. It's a journey.

Apologies if this is to the wrong person.

[sjs94704]

Jason:

I appreciate what your saying about trying to run before I walk.

However, I would certainly hope that you or anyone else on this board would never interpret anything I ask about as me trying to do more than I should at this point in my learning how to mix.

Why? Because most, if not ALL of the videos I find on YouTube are NOT marked in some way that says what is a basic, intermediate or advanced topics so that I would know ....

If I did, then my questions would be dramatically different !!!

We've all heard the old saying, "One thing leads to another", right?

That is all that is going on here from my perspective..... Nothing more, nothing less!

Thanks for your understanding .....

[foxAsteria]

It's unnecessary in most cases. I used to normalize everything just so I could see the waveforms better, but in Reaper there is an action to "increase peak gain" which does the same job without touching the audio. It's also not a reliable way of increasing volume, because you can often have a single loud peak which will reach the normalization limit far before anything else, so the process will produce only a small gain increase overall.

[RDBOIS]

Never done it, never will.

[Mr. PC]

Normalizing sets the highest peak-gain to 0.

If you want to do that, then normalize.

About what's good and bad? Well that's for Nietzsche to decide, but in a mix there's no reason to normalize; most likely your master track will get too loud. It'll also increase your chances of clipping (many plugins will clip, even in 32bit float).

If the vocals aren't cutting through, turn down the volume on other tracks; otherwise you can turn up the vocals' gain.

Select a track and press 'V', it'll open the volume automation. You can switch it to 'volume pre-effects' if you like, and that'll update the waveform display as you alter gain (suppose you want to keep the volume consistent, this is useful).

[divedive]

I never normalize.

Set your gain stages appropriately during record. If your pre's are low budget and non-linearly add hiss as you crank them, get new pres (just kidding), rather record at a low level and don't drive those noisey pres. (Turn up your monitor on that track). If you record at 24 bit, the quantization noise floor is something like -144 dB, so digital gaining up after is preferable to driving a poor pre.

However, if you're recording many takes, you probably don't want to get into gaining individual clips, because you'll have to continually re execute that decision with each new clip / edit.
Instead use a gain plug on the track to get the signal to a reasonable level. This way you can just add takes from that same tracking session to the track w/o having to gain each one. Then use a limiter as your last plugin for final gain staging. I like iZotope Ozone Maximizer but there are tons of limiters these days that are great.

With all that said, so long as you don't normalize past 0, there's nothing wrong with it, since it doesn't distort the waveform.

Best of luck.

[echoblaster]

Originally Posted by foxAsteria

It's unnecessary in most cases. I used to normalize everything just so I could see the waveforms better, but in Reaper there is an action to "increase peak gain" which does the same job without touching the audio. It's also not a reliable way of increasing volume, because you can often have a single loud peak which will reach the normalization limit far before anything else, so the process will produce only a small gain increase overall.

Do you mean the action "Increase peak view gain" or "Item Processing>Normalize Items"? These are very different.
The short answer to the OP's question is twofold. 1) Have good gain staging from start to finish 2) if somebody messed up number one at the start, normalize.

Esoteric answer:
Many ways to gain stage, good mixes have happy headroom and minimize noise floor. Get that, the rest is personal style.

I can think of many times as a mixing engineer that I need to use normalize whether I like it or not. At least within Reaper it's nondestructive, so it becomes a discussion of to do, or not to do, earlier or downstream?

[sjs94704]

It looks like the consensus is that NOT normalizing is the way to go, at least in most cases. However, I guess there are still going to be cases where it is the BEST thing to do!

Thank Again everyone!