Sunday, February 10, 2013

Pushing the Loud with Boss RC-50 and GT-100

The "Large Flying Reptiles" song from yesterday is quite bad but it was fun doing it.  You are hereby formally notified of a Geek Alert in the material that follows!

What I wanted yesterday was to bring up the volume as there is an ongoing problem with getting the levels right.  The Boss RC-50 looper reports that the signal from the guitar is peaking (i.e. it is so hot / loud that it peaks and this results in clipping the waveform and this is what you hear as distortion or crackling, etc).  However, if I run the guitar into the recording software native (i.e. bypass the Boss RC-50), there is no sign of the signal going anywhere near a peak.  Therefore, I have a problem to solve.

Since I had confirmed with the standalone test (i.e. monitoring without the looper) that the guitar signal is not peaking, I decided to ignore the report from the RC-50 and record anyway.  The result was "Large Flying Reptiles" and I was monitoring it very loud but I wasn't picking up much destructive distortion in it.  Obviously the guitar sound was distorted but that was generated by the Boss GT-100 (guitar amplifier simulator and effects) deliberately and that's what I consider 'good' distortion while clipping is 'bad' distortion.

However, what I did observe is that the waveform did not approach peaks in the recording but it was heavily saturated (i.e. a thick black band which gave the impression of heavy compression although I had specifically set up the guitar patch to eliminate compression).  This is the biggest problem with loud as it makes a sound that is relentless and it just plain wears out your ears and your mind when you listen to it.

I don't know what I will record today but I may try a different approach to the same song.  I already pretty much hate it but the song may have one more recording pass in it before I send it to the musical bonfire (i.e. iTunes graveyard).  My biggest intrigue at the moment is getting loud happening in such a way that it does not cause your ears to scream for their mother.

We shall see ... or at least hear.

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