How Much Headroom Do I Actually Have In The Box?

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(This article is not discussing how audio levels impact plugins, or what happens at an output leading to a d/a converter. This article is discussing the linear behavior of audio passing between channels within our DAW.) What you’re seeing in the picture: Going Up Taking a test tone, calibrated to -18dbfs Boosting that test tone to +762db of gain above … Read More

Understanding Drum Sample Libraries.

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From bedroom producers, to the top brass mixing engineers with multiple grammies, there are a lot of people who use drum samples in their mixes. Joey Sturgis is famous for using Kick 10 from Steven Slate Drums in many of his productions (although now Joey Sturgis has his own sample library on the market called Drumforge), and Randy Staub used … Read More

Why I use Expanders on DI’s.

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Picture 1. In the first picture, you’ll see 4 colored bands on the analyzer. The red band is the noise floor of my interface, and it’s reading down around -110dbfs. The dark orange band at the very bottom is where the expander is pushing that noise floor to, down around -170dbfs. I usually use HoRNet Track Utility to bring the … Read More