OK, this may seem like quite an elementary question, and a lot of you
probably are gonna look at me and think I'm nuts for asking, but here's my
situation.
I have a pare of head phones which I've been using for a while now. I'm not
gonna sit here and lie to you guies. They're IFrogs. They're not
studio-grade by any theory of the spectrom. I do have a pare that is studio
grade, that probably in the days costed roughly 3 or 400 bucks, but those
things literally speaking are about 20 years old, and have gone through so
much wear and tare that the headband is becoming loose, and the left ear
piece is drooping down off my ear, no matter how many times I readjust it's
hinge. Anyway, that's totally aside the point...
Basically, here's the deal. The IFrogs I have are sort of noise cancelling,
but not really. You'd think this would be a good thing in some cases, but
it actually's not helping matters. The thing is, even with them on, my
voice, whether singing, or talking is not hardly canceled/muffled at all.
Because of this, I've honestly just learned to get used to the problem I'm
facing, and play devils advocate, and just say whatever, I'll deal with it.
Basically, the thing is, I always process my vocals *after!* I have them
recorded. Never during. I find that if I try to do it in realtime, for
one, I can't always until the vocal track is totally laid down determine
what things need to be tweeked. The problem however is, when I was tought
initially by Kevin, as well as others about recording vocals, I was told you
always always always! want to record at a low level, then use gain
compensation like a limiter, or say, a compressor etc. to bring the level up
to adiquit range. With this said, my technique personally, is I always try
keeping my vocals on the input level somewhere in the neighborhood of -12
to -10 at the most, DB. I'm talking about the level that I see just
immediately one vo+right arrow to the right of the volume up down slider on
each track. I try not to let it peek above -10 at the absolutely most, and
really, that's for me even a bit overkill. Normally, I shoot for around -12
if I can get within several decimal ranges from there, like 12-3, or 12.5,
somewhere around there. Obviously, this is before I apply any dynamics, or
e queueing or the like. The issue is, once I hit shift+R to arm my track
for recording, obviously, at that level of -12DB, I'm hardly gonna hear
anything through my monitors. I know I could turn up the headphone monitor
dial on my interface, but even doing that, I'm having to run it darned near
wide open to hear anything. Yeah, I can run the output volume slider on the
track in PT up to a higher level, but even with it as high as it'll go at
+12DB, it's barely audible until I run vocal compression. Basically I use
the compresser/limiter dyns3 plugin, and I change none of the parameters,
but I use the vocal leveler preset, which is under the librarian menu inside
the vocals sub menu. Even doing that though, I'm having to run my level
almost to +12DB on the slider on the track strip within PT. Not that that
is a problem, as I can run the music way down, to meet that of the vocal,
then just pop a master fader and bring everything back up in the final mix,
but the problem is with my monitorring through the headphones. Being that
without processing anything, I hardly can hear my vocals at all, and if I
make it loud enough that I can, then I clip like the holy virgin Mary!
Parden the pun for you religious folks... LOL! I just don't exactly know
how would be best to work around this.
I'm using a Blue Bluebird microphone without the shockmount, as my stand
won't support it, plus the windscreen that came with the mike. Then I'm
using phantom power through the mono xlr input on my interface, which is an
M-Audio Fast Track C400. ProTools 10.0 standard, on Snow Leopard 10.6.8,
interfacing via USB, with the correct M-Audio drivers installed, and a white
stocked 13 inch macbook mid 2010. Any help is greatly appreciated. I just
need to know how we can get my mike on the monitor, without clipping ramped
up to a level where it can be audible, as I don't wanna just go by well,
it's armed, I know it's recording, I can hear myself through the ear muffs.
No... I wanna literally hear exactly what's going into the DAW.
Thank you kindly,
Christopher-Mark Gilland.
Founder of CLG Productions
Blog:
http://www.clgproductions.org
Podcast:
http://clgproductions.podhoster.com
E-mail:
ch...@clgproductions.com
IMessage/Facetime:
theblindmusic...@att.net
Windows Live Messenger:
ch...@blindperspectives.net
Twitter:
@gilland_chris
Facebook:
http://www.facebook.com/christopher.gilland
Skype:
twinklesfriend2007
Send me a fax from any standard fax machine:
704-697-2069
Google Voice: (Please use sparingly):
980-272-8570
