Indie Rock 101

CHAPTER 6 Recording

Headroom

Recording wet versus dry

Mic types and placement

Drums

Bass

Guitar

Acoustic guitars

Keys

Vocals

Before we get into the particulars of recording individual instruments and sounds, let’s start off with a few basic recording concepts you should become familiar with.

 

HEADROOM

Headroom is a term referring to the amount of “room” you have between your audio signal’s maximum volume and 0 dBfs in any given channel (dBfs is deciBels full-scale—a measure of level in the digital domain where zero is the top of the scale and all level values below that are referenced as negative numbers). Even though you set your hardware or software faders to control gain and relative volume for each track, the “maximum” volume for individual ...