[Laurence Payne]

On Thu, 11 Jan 2007 00:51:02 -0500, jtougas
wrote:

In my pursuit of improving my recordings, I've taken a few of my mixes
to a friend of mine, to see what he thinks, and I mentioned I'd
normalized one or two of the channels in the tracks since they were a
little quieter than the others.

He looked at me with a fairly shocked expression and said "Oh, man,
you should never normalize!"

I shrugged and said "Okay" (I was after, going to him for advice). But
I should have asked him why not.

So I'm asking y'all: why not?

Or should I take the middle road and apply sparingly?

I tend to record solo singer/songwriters with guitar, so there's not a
lot of background stuff going on with which I could hide problems.


Ideally, you'd have recorded at a level that didn't require
normalising.

But there's a lot of dynamic range in today's 24 bit audio files. You
could probably mix with most of the faders in the bottom inch of their
range with no perceptible quality loss. If it's more convenient to
boost one track (by normalising, or with a channel gain control) it's
not a disaster. What DOES it sound like? "A lot" of range isn't
infinite range, of course :-)