Quote:
Originally Posted by jmob77
I am wondering if anyone has recommendations of anything to change or add to this process?
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You can stop doing all of that, just get a good input level to your converters. Job done.
None of what you have said will make any difference to anything audible. Digital audio is just numbers, and anything that happens to increase or decrease the size of those numbers is just mathematics. It is comparable to volume or gain in analogue systems, but that's where the similarity ends; wherever you do it the signal flow of a floating point system simply doesn't matter. They are the same thing. It provably, objectively doesn't matter. Its just maths
Record your drums so you are getting sufficient level that you are out of the noise floor of your preamps, but not too much that there is any danger of them clipping. Ignore all this -18dB stuff, that might be correct sometimes but not others, no one can say so who isn't in your session and working with your sources.
Don't compress anything, ever, unless you personally make the artistic choice to do so. In the old days a little compression going to tape was worthwhile (but only if artistically appropriate) because of the limitations of tape. Some people role-play that those limitations are still present in digital audio, and are even desirable, which is wrong. This is good news, rejoice
I seem to have made this weird YouTube fed 'gain staging' misinformation the hill on which I die. Apologies if I have ranted at you, and please believe me that I'm just trying to stop this muddle-headed silliness from spreading to the Reaper forum.