Beginner Question About Input Volume

Audacity Help Forum Windows
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Hey there, I’m a guitarist/vocalist and I’m completely new to recording my own stuff. I went out and bought a Samson C01U and I’ve been using it for my acoustic guitar and voice, I can’t emphasize enough how little I know about recording and mixing though. Anyway, I’ve got a question about the input volume while I’m doing vocals. A friend of mine told me that generally I should set up my mic position and input volume so that when I monitor the input, the red bar comes close to topping out, but doesn’t actually hit the end of the bar (please forgive my lack of technical terminology). This is a pretty simple task with guitar, because the volume generally stays the same throughout the take, however, when I’m doing vocals, my voice naturally gets louder when I’m trying to hit a high note. What this leads to is the vocal track overloading the mic at certain points, but I can’t lower the input volume any more or the softer parts would be too quiet. How do I go about resolving this? The tracks I’m currently working on fluctuate pretty sporadically between high and low, so I can’t really just put different parts on different tracks.

Any advice at all is very much appreciated! Try to keep it pretty simple if you can, I’m very, very new to this.

Thanks!

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Isn’t live recording fun? People look at the music that recording artists produce and their own live recording and say: “What’s wrong with this picture?”

Rock Star performer voices and music go through intense processing and “polishing” before you ever hear the show. Nobody short of one or two folk performers ever puts out work “raw” from the microphone, and most times, even they have some work done.

Peak overload or “clipping” is deadly and few if any tools are available to fix it, so you should never do that. Keep cranking the recording volume down until overload never happens. In general, that gives a recording “target” of around -6 or maybe a little lower. You need to work with your particular voice.

For the blue waves, that works out to half (0.5) or lower.

http://kozco.com/tech/audacity/Audacity1_record.jpg

Then, in post production, apply Effect > Compressor… tool to condense your voice into being loud without peak damage.

http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/compressor.html

I know the question dangling from your lips right now is: “Can I apply compression as I make the recording?”
No. At least not with a simple USB microphone. You have to do compression and effects with a microphone and mixer system designed to do that before Audacity gets it. There is a parallel poster planning on doing exactly that for his podcast, but his system is very much bigger than yours.

Audacity is a post production editor and doesn’t do anything by itself in real time.

Then mix in the guitar and rebalance with the other editing tools until you have a pleasant mix. DO NOT jam everything into one stereo show until you get finished tuning the performance. We can’t split up a mixed show into individual instruments and voices. Once you Export one WAV file for burning onto a CD or MP3 for posting on-line, that’s the end of production tuning and adjusting.

If you save a Project, Audacity will retain all your individual tracks for opening later, but it will not save UNDO. That’s the difference between Save and Export.

Koz

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One particularly evil newbie error is using MP3 for everything. Never do production in MP3. MP3 causes sound distortion and you can’t stop it. The distortion can get worse and worse as you edit your song. Use Audacity Projects and WAV format sound files.

If you need to post on-line or to your Personal Music Player, then you make the MP3 with the idea you’re never going to edit or change it ever again. If you do need to change something, go back to the Project or WAV version of the song.

Koz

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This is a Project:
http://manual.audacityteam.org/o/man/audacity_projects.html

Koz

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Your friend is right. There is a limit to how high you can go without clipping (distorted flat-top waves).

I don’t think your mic has an analog gain control, but I doubt your voice is loud enough to cause clipping in the digital output. (An electric guitar might do it.)

my voice naturally gets louder when I’m trying to hit a high note. What this leads to is the vocal track overloading the mic at certain points, but I can’t lower the input volume any more or the softer parts would be too quiet. How do I go about resolving this? The tracks I’m currently working on fluctuate pretty sporadically between high and low, so I can’t really just put different parts on different tracks.

First, try to control your vocal volume as much as you can without messing-up your singing or artistic expression.

You can also move nearer/farther from the mic as you are singing. A lot of singers do that. As you move closer to the mic the proximity effect tends to boost the bass, which a lot of singers also take creative advantage of, but it can also be an undesirable effect.

But the real trick is dynamic compression (and sometimes limiting). Compression boosts the quiet parts and/or lowers the loud parts. In practice, it’s normally used to make “everything louder”. Limiting is basically “soft clipping”, again mostly used to make the recording “louder”.

There is a compressor effect and there are many optional compressor plug-ins.

Sometimes pros stick a hardware compressor/limiter between the preamp and analog-to-digital converter so that they can record at a higher level without clipping the analog-to-digital converter. But that’s just slight compression/limiting to “tame” the rare or unexpected peak. And, you can’t un-do it later in software. You can’t us a hardware compressor with a USB mic, and it shouldn’t be necessary anyway.

Most modern commercial recordings have a TON of compression to get that modern “constantly loud” sound. The individual tracks usually have some compression with more compression added to the final mix during mastering. It takes a good compressor and lots of skill & experience to get that sound, and most home recordings are not as “loud” as commercial releases.

On the other hand, the lack of compression is one thing that makes live music sound better than a recording. Some classical & jazz recordings are made with no compression.

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That would be the difference between Open and Light and Natural (and lower volume) and Dense, Forward, Intense and very loud.
This is one of the production decisions you make when you record and present your performance.

And yes, that’s one of the shortcomings of a USB microphone. A whole recording studio has been jammed into one microphone without the recording engineer, so the internal settings have to be safe and convenient for the most people. Your only option is tailor your live performance for the microphone’s sweet spot.

Too low and you can struggle with the microphone noise (ffffffffffffff) and too high and you’ll get overload cracking and clicking. You can’t filter either one out in Audacity.

Koz