Hello, I'm new here but not to producing music. I mainly produce electronic music, but my brother is a singer that wishes to get into recording his own vocal performances over Karaoke tracks.

In order to do this he has pruchased some gear RODE NT1, stand, pop shield, Rokit RP5, Reason Ballance interface, the D.A.W of choice is directed by me because this is the one I know best to help him, and is simple enough for him to learn, yet powerfull enough to grow into.

Onto my problem is all about two areas, gain stanging, and monitoring.

Gain staging and working with a vocalist.

While I'm not new to music production, I am to recording vocals, and am in turn learning myself to teach him. From what Iv gathered I should be setting his mic input gain so it reads -10 or lower at its highest peeks. The only way I can get to set this up is if he sings the loudest part of a song, is that fair to expect him to do this on tap over and over again, shouldnt he at least warm up first? So I'm sitting them asking him to sing the loudest part as if he was going for a recording, I set it up to -10db, then he goes for recording and one round the peek is at -25 db, another try he is hitting -2db with no head room. What is being done wrong here?

Monitoring his own Vocals,"not loud enough"

Assuming we get the input gain correct, we now have a second issue, he cant hear his own voice. This has arrived from what I see as two areas. 1: he is singing along with a mastered piece of music which has had its dynamics crushed, where as his own voice is, well! as dynamic as it can get from -28 to -6db. Should he need to improve his mic technique a little, should I have to turn that music crazy low so he can hear his own vocals? 2: He is monitoring his voice through Reason and does not seem to monitor as lound as when played back after recording? He is using decent headphones that are 250 ohm, the audio interface has not enough power for headphones, plus the monitoring is so low anyway, even through speakers. Im not sure how to go about fixing this, but have come to a comclusion we need a heaphone amp, but won't this cause a lot of hiss being that I have to take away 20db off the music so he can hear his own voice, then boost it all with the headphone amp?

How are things set up professionaly, what am I missing here?

Thanks, Daniel.

Hi, I have an audio cassette that I am going to transfer to digital.

1. Is there an adapter I can run from the cassette player out to my PreSonus interface (VSL 22) that would let me do the analog to digital conversion? Or should I just mic it up old school off the cassette deck and capture it that way?
2. The audio cassette has some low level noise which we believe to be the flip side track of the cassette bleeding through due to bad tape head alignment - would the best way to edit that out be to monitor the level and set a limiter on the track in my workstation to create a noise gate on those levels?

Thanks.

Hi guys, I dont know that much about audio, I am more a video guy. I am making a video for a friend in costa rica and I hired a costa rican sound guy to make the audio. . It is terrible.

He recorded the levels VERY low and there are some sort of cicada's or locusts making a high pitch hiss in the background. I am now back in the states and looking for any way I can salvage this audio to be used for an online only video. Keep in mind I work in final cut and only have the audio filters that come stock (apple & fcp)

here is a sample audio clip so you guys can here it, what filters should i use?

Avid

THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH IN ADVANCE!

Just a quick question here. I'm getting a really low level when recording vocals. I have an Mbox mini, and Shure SM58 mic. The gain is maxed out and I'm still getting low levels. I was just wondering if it's because I'm recording with a dynamic mic instead of a condensor,or if something else is wrong. Thanks.
 

So I am recording from a Yamaha USB Mixing Studio MW10, into both PC and Mac using both Garageband and Cubase LE.

I can set the levels nice and high on the desk. However, into cubase/garageband the levels are quite low, where yes I can clearly hear the recording is working, but I have to pump my monitoring high and boost the tracks... which limits my mixing power and just makes the process a bit of a nightmare.

Any ideas? Stones I haven't turned over?

Cheers guys!

hi all.
after many fruitless hours of research into this i have decided to irritate some of you with some questions :)

i am running a windows xp Cubase or reaper based setup with a Focusrite saffire pro 40 as the interface.
i also have a Focusrite twintrak(TT) pro with the a/d card installed.

using the twintrack i am sending both preamp signals via S/PDIF to the pro 40 then into windows.
now, my concern is:

if i set the gain to a good level on the TT its way too big in the pro 40 interface window. i have come down on the pres and retried with better results but still occasional recorded clipping in the daw.
if i keep pulling the pre gain down arent i reducing the s/n ratio in a bad way?
am i missing something?
any thoughts would be greatly appreciated :)

Ok, I just picked this guy up from L&M on the weekend and I haven't had much time to play around with it yet (2 hours) but I've noticed something that kind of bugs me. I plugged in an SM57 to record acoustic guitar with, just as a quick little test. I also plugged in a direct line from my guitars active pickup. Both lines were into pre-amp channels 1 and 2 on the 400f respectively.

On the front of the Onyx 400f there are LED indicators to show sound level. I need to crank up the gain on both of the chanels in order for the LEDs to even light up, if they are cranked and I have the vol on my guitar turned all the way up and I am within 4 inches from the mic, then I get a decent level (not clipping yet) on both channels. Any less and the level is too low for my liking. There doesn't seem to be a situation where I could even get an instrument to clip. The line from my guitar's pickup is going into the pre-amp on the 400f, if I plug it into the line in, I don't get a level reading at all on the front LEDs.

I did not expect this to happen with this unit, it seems that I cannot really push the volume if I wanted too; I'm doing everything I can to get ENOUGH volume.

I played around with the DSP mixer settings and everything is turned all the way up, no mutes or solo buttons or anything like that.

I'm wondering if anyone else who has this unit has had this problem or might know anything about it. Any help at all would be appreciated.

I'm using Windows based Cubase SX, but I don't suspect the DAW has anything to do with this.

I just purchased the firepod yesterday and I'm having problems with getting any real level. I tried to record separately a vibraphone (with a MXL V67 with phantom power on) and vocals with an Audix OM5 and in both cases, I barely get any level on the channels I decide to record on. And I mean, barely any. I'll be lucky if the meter on the channel even lights up. What am I missing? Is the unit defective? Is there a pad somewhere?

Hello

I am trying to record from tape unamped line-out of tape deck into notebook computer (t40) using unamped line-in of ECHO Indigo IO PCMCIA sound card. The signal is too low (-30db max). Recording works very fine with other cards like M-audio (but I really do not like USB interface for getting so easy interrupted) which most probably amplify the signal even though they do not mention so.

Can someone please let me know whether is there some simple preamp that can be used to amplify the signal from line-out of tape deck to the level acceptable by unamped line-in Echo Indigo Soundcard?

Can I use preamp like Audio Buddy from M-Audio which only has guitar and microphone amps?
I cant find any other preamps being sold except Mic, Guitar and Turntable preamps.

Thank you for advice

Petr