How to gain stage your mic pre and interface

jaynm26 said:
I jus want to say I joined this group because of morning_star. GREAT ADVICE! I have to say it again GREAT! ADVICE!! WOW! I have been in the professional business for 8 yrs and have never heard of this. Morning Star I am going to go buy all project studio equipment because of this advice you gave Im serious. I have been working on a SSL 4000 for some 5 years and have never played round with home studio/mbox/ cheap mic's and the whole home mixer game. ALL BECAUSE OF GAIN STAGING & HEADROOM! I never could get into I use so much headroom in my SSL for years. I jus simply couldnt get into ever! I use pro tools on the SSL never heard of trim We use Heat on our HD systems never trim because we always have head room. I know all bout the dBu Metering and its range from -24 dB to +24 dB and in digital dBFS Full Scale. I know exactly what your talking bout digital 0 in a DAW is +4 in a console its over +14 extra gain THAS NOT NEEDED ITS TOO HOT!!!!!! NO HEADROOM!! Those of you young eng and novice "dont mean that in a derogatory way" PLEASE LISTEN TO MORNING STAR!! He is so correct -10 or -18 IS NOT TO LOW!!! I REPEAT -18 IS NOT TO LOW! Our ears have been tricked and trained to listen to loud. Our eyes have been tricked to think -10 is to quiet and 0 (which is really +24 on a dB meter) is what we need its a lie a big fat lie! Its like someone painting a car blue when it was originally black and their telling you it was originally a big fat damn lie! This is how we got to the loudness wars in the first place. Old saying "Just because the lights green dosent mean you can speed". Just cuz we got all those extra dB's up there, extra headroom dosent mean its good to use ALL OF IT!
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Thanks for the kind words. Yeah, things are easy when you have a million dollar desk to handle your hot levels. Also things are easy in the analog world when you have an extra 18 db of headroom and all you do is make sure you have your master set correctly.

I've been pushing less than great gear to the limits for years. I'm currently in the middle of buying all new gear so I can get some of that analog headroom.
 
I don't really get the instructions for Pro Tools. Any explanations/articles for clean recordings in pro tools with no clippings?
My method is just have the vocalist rap/sing into the mic, and I turn the Ch. 1 gain on my interface until the meter in PT is going up to around the green/yellow line
 
Great advice, there are so many little things that a producer can do to make their audio sound good... Every music production tip helps, I think this one is a powerful one because it's all about getting the signal in perfectly.
 
Thank you so much for letting us know about this! I must say that you are a very dedicated person to have written a wonderful post like this! It is very useful to me. thanks a lot.
 
Laavish said:
What if you're using Ableton?
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You use the PSP VU meter like I said earlier.

---------- Post added at 06:44 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:42 PM ----------
DREWILLS said:
So what exactly does a vu meter do?
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This is explained already. A VU meter measures signal voltage in the real world. You use a VU meter so that your analog signal is gain staged to the digital scale.
 
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