Guitar Gear Forum

If the little number in the box (marked with a white circle) is showing as red. What does that mean, and how do I make sure I rectify any issues.

Red is clipping. You should never, in a mixing session, get anywhere near clipping. Honestly, single tracks should hover around -20. Overall mix (Output) should hover below -9.

Ways to rectify it are to make sure your inputs never exceed -18 at a bare minimum, probably closer to -20 or even -25, figure out your gain staging so your loudest track stays below -18 at peak, and keep your overall mix before any processing (master compression/maximizer/etc) below -9. Use the faders, use utility gain as a plugin, use your preamp settings for hardware interfaces, and keep things a lot lower than you'd think. You'll see your overall sound open up a lot once you start doing this. It seems really counterintuitive at first, but the more you mess with it, the more sense it makes.

Hmm... is there an example of before and after with this? Is this because it cause difficulties in the mix down/master process?

Yeah its clipped at some point suring play back, try either bringing the volume down or using a limiter

Elessar [Sly] wrote:Hmm... is there an example of before and after with this? Is this because it cause difficulties in the mix down/master process?

Yeah, it does cause difficulties with mixing and mastering.

If I were home I could dig out one of my old mixes where I tried to keep every channel as close to clip as I could without going over, and then show you some once I learned to back off, but there were a lot of other changes that happened along with that as I was just learning the process. The closer you are to clipping, the less headroom you have left for processing, mixing and mastering. The more room you leave, the more room you have to work with for processing.

Recording closer to zero db, even before clipping, sounds really strident in comparison to recording lower. A lot of analog to digital converters, especially in consumer grade equipment, work best in the -20 range. It actually starts introducing some artifacting as you raise above that.

Recording close to zero and then trying to mix results in a very strident, thin, almost buzzy sounding mix. I can probably dig something out tonight if I get time in the recording room to show you. It's a pretty noticeable difference.

Top advice dude! Much appreciated