Another tip drawn from the Sweetwater GearFest Producers Panel discussion, this one coming from mixer/remixer/producer/studio owner Fab Dupont: “You’re recording too loud!”
Fab doesn’t mean that you should turn down the guitar amp or play the drums softer; he means that most of us record at levels that are too hot in our DAWs. According to Fab (and other knowledgeable engineers), you should aim for levels in the -18 to -10 decibel range. This allows for lots of headroom per track, allows for invisible intersample peaks, and lets the DAWs summing bus work more effectively.
Try it, you’ll probably find your tracks are suddenly more open, with more realistic and less strained transients.
