Best (and worst) Recording Advice I've ever gotten #2 - Digital OVERS

Image courtesy of Reaper Audio

I was at a recording studio this one time watching my Dad record some tracks for a release he and his band were working on.

Dad was playing his beautiful old Yamaha acoustic guitar hard, and it was clipping the digital audio interface. It sounded terrible. The engineer commented that he needed to record as hot as possible, to make sure the signal was healthy enough to mask any background noise (that's bad advice ... more on that later). He also commented that a few digital overs were no big deal, since his interface (an RME something or other) was pretty forgiving.

This is bad advice #1. There is no such thing as a "forgiving" digital over. However, there is such a thing as forgiving clipping within the analog domain. The difference is hard vs soft clipping. With digital audio, you are either clipped or not. You can model pleasing analog clipping and saturation with plugins (Variety of sound makes some really cool free analogue modeled VST plugins),

Perhaps the "forgiving" part of digital clipping is whether you have the ability to actually hear the digital overs - but this is just whether your monitoring system is accurate, because a digital over is a digital over. It exists whether you can hear it or not. The problem areas you don't perceive will need to be fixed during mastering. If your mastering engineer is really good, he or she might be able to use some expensive restoration tools to make the digital overs less nasty sounding. But you honestly NEVER want to have to get to that point in the first place, because there will be unintended trade-offs to repairing your poorly recorded tracks.

Here's a picture to drive this point home. Notice the greyed out parts of the sound file represented below. This information should have been there, as it is the would-be of an audible sound. But, because the audio is digitally clipped, the information is literally sliced off and you are left with a terrible sounding crackle that masks the depth and detail of the sound.

Image courtesy of wikimedia

Here is a 16 minute video that further explains digital clipping vs analogue clipping extremely well, courtesy of Mastering Engineer Ian Sheppard.

Oh, and you might be wondering what happened to my Dad's clipped guitar recording? Since the engineer wouldn't turn down his pre-amps, I told my dad to play quieter, knowing that the engineer would simply raise the volume of the track in the mix. This worked like a charm - he recorded a really nice sounding track to complement the song.

Until Next Time,
Here's to your music,
Ryan

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