Red Peaks in Sonar
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Posted on Jan 22, 2008 12:01 am
sourberry
Member Since: Jan 21, 2008
I have 4 tracks in Sonar 5:
Melody, bass, pads and drums.
My drums are not loud enough. I want to increase the gain on them. So I applied parallel compression on the drums. But this gave me a lot of red peaks.
So I put a free Brickwall limiter on the drum track. I found it free on KVR audio. And this seems to take away the red peaks after gain increase.
Is this the correct way of doing this. I'm really confused about gain in general. It seems that everyone talks about compressing tracks to get a good volume level. But they never tell you that this will give you a lot of red peaks and possibly distortion. Please help.
The free plugin that I am using is:
www.kvraudio.com/get/1727.html%20Pocket%20Limiter
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Kaos62Kaos is only a form of insanityMember
Since: Feb 03, 2005
Jan 22, 2008 12:52 am Hi sourberry and welcome to HRC
To obtain a good level of volume it requires various things,
A good strong signal when tracking (this doesn't mean high volume but a good clear signal), good compression, proper EQ'ing to make space for the instruments and then the mastering process (an art in it's self).
Cleaning up the bass frequencies will give you more headroom and a chance to push the volume up on a track. the use of limiters are frequent,together with compression, but relying on them for all the tracks and all of the time will mean a squished sound and very little dynamics.
Now, squished lifeless music seems to becoming standard. If you want to record say jazz, orchestral and say ballad type music you will want to have really good dynamic range, whereas if you are doing Grindcore the dynamics are not that important.
Don't get into the battle of your music has to be loud to be good - you have a volume knob so use it!
Dematrixhttp://www.reverbnation.com/2ndgMember
Since: Nov 27, 2007
Jan 24, 2008 08:03 pm im not sure about sonar but in some software there is a normalizer option. if you click on the wave and choose it where ever it is on sonar, it will bring the volume up to 0 db or whatever you wanna set it at. works good.
unless youve already done that.
