Drums clipping?

A

Anarchy12

New member
Hey FP, I have a question which is likely very basic because I don't know much about mixing, but it's been driving me crazy. Every time I make a track in Logic I load up a few drums in Ultrabeat and tap something out. Now the drums will sound tight to me...loud, but not too loud because I want it the drums to be banging. They sound about right to my ears with the melodic part of the beat.

But the Logic meters always tell me I'm heavily clipping, with the 6.0 in red. If I turn the drums down to where it says I'm not clipping anymore, they sound way low in the mix to where I can barely hear them.

There's probably an obvious answer to this but it's beyond my basic understanding of mixing, so can anybody enlighten me?

Peace.
 
Thanks, guess that was an easy question. Will that not make my track come out real quiet when I bounce it though?
 
^^cosine

you are currently at the mixing stage, which is separate from the mastering stage, in your project. your goal here is to get the different aspects of the track to sit together without distortion or other crud. Banging comes from the mastering stage, although too many "producers" try to add mastering elements during a mix these days.

you might want to read this and watch the videos to get a better understanding of the issues

If you can’t hear it, it doesn’t matter, right ? WRONG

came in an e-mail last night
 
Thanks yall, that's helpful even though it means I have a lot more work to do on my tracks to get them to sound right. I've read a bunch of times on here that "You master ALBUMS, not songs" but I gather that's not the case. Guess I'll have to head over to the mastering thread next.
 
no, you do master albums. but you also master singles (a song that will not necessarily be heard in the context of an album any time soon).

The thing is, the epithets you read are about large scale projects; very little is written about individual/small projects. However, everything written about a large scale project does scale back nicely to the individual case.
 
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