Free Tutorial - Recording Levels in Pro Tools

[Kenny Gioia]

Want to learn out how to get your Recording Levels right into your DAW? Check out this Free Tutorial. KennyMania 2014.

http://www.kennymania.com/recording-...-in-pro-tools/

[TC_TC_TC]

I like it !!!

[mesaone]

Hi Kenny,

Nice video. Smart idea, helping people educate themselves about meters and signal level. I particularly like how you walk through multiple ways to set a visual reference, and explain the value of color break versus reference level. You've got a pleasing voice (Boston?) and I think this is a great start.

I see a few problems here:

1. Most importantly, the instructions in this video will not help people avoid clipping the ADC on the way into Pro Tools. It will help people avoid clipping on playback, but that's a different story. If Johnny Homestudio followed this video, he could be clipping the hell out of his input and think it's just fine because he turned down the faders in Pro Tools to show no clip lights.
2. -18 dBFS isn't necessarily a benchmark, especially with the PT Classic meters
3. The way you have it set up, you're flying blind with the headroom. You don't actually have "more headroom to play with", you just have less visual feedback.

Since you're worried about two things here (clipping and headroom) then I suggest the following:

1. emphasize that the pro tools faders are NOT trim for the incoming signal, and that people should be adjusting their gain before conversion to get in the bright green with the channel fader at zero. An explanation of this should be the very first thing in the video, if this is aimed at newbies.
2. set your color breaks high to -12 and color break low to -24
3. use the sample peak meter for tracks receiving live input
4. also emphasize that meters are a guideline, and people should not rely on them to determine if a take was good or not.

Maybe next time you can incorporate the PT signal, so viewers can hear it instead of looking at silent meters. Altogether good work, I just thought of a few things that you could improve on.