Headroom

I want to share with you what my friend Ben Burnes (Abstraction) shared with me this morning, if you too are an indie musician recording your own music and wanting to produce it in the most professional way possible.  Come with me as I document what I learn.  

He said I had a lot of clipping in the recording, both in the vocal and guitar parts. If you have pretty decent music editing software red lines will indicate where the audio clips because it was recorded too loud.

What happens when audio clips is that it is being recorded beyond that capacity of the microphone or computer to properly process the audio signal. The wave generated is too large and the peaks/troughs get "clipped" off, creating audio crackles and other unfriendly artifacts.

Here's a quick example of how clipping looks:

The first line is a normal sine wave. The second line is the sine wave's volume being boosted beyond the limitation of the machine. When the volume is brought back down to normal levels, you can see that the peaks and troughs of the wave have been clipped off creating an entirely different sound.

While he wasn't saying that I needed to go out and re-record everything, it's something that I should keep in mind for the future. The rule of thumb is to turn your microphone sensitivity down to the point where you can sing your loudest and still have space to spare. The traditional space (called "headroom" in the industry) you should give between your loudest singing and the absolute max of the system is -6db. Boosting audio volume is easy, but cleaning up clipped audio is very difficult because in essence part of the wave form is destroyed.

Just so you know Ben is responsible for the piano part in this amazing piece, Drifting, a collaboration with The Reverb Junkie and Genettic.