Various Level Adjustments etc.

[JD01]

Dunno if this even matters really,

Was going through the levels on my projects earlier.
The faders on my kick, snare, toms, etc are set between -10 and -18 or so.
My bass is set to -16 and my guitars are set to -22.

Then I have my limiter set to -12. I suppose I could raise the level of everything in my mix a bit so I'm not adding quite so much with the limiter?
The only oddity is while everything else is way below 0, my Overheads are actually set to 0 in reaper and in the mixer in Superior Drummer they're only set to about -2.

Does any of this even matter?

[CrowsofFritz]

I almost never pay any attention to what the numbers say. Only to how it sounds. Even if the levels are going into the red on the channel, that doesn’t mean it’s clipping of the master is turned down.

It’ll get too much into the weeds if you mix with your eyes. That said, the OH levels are an interesting tidbit. But if it sounds fine, it doesn’t matter.

[JD01]

I almost never pay any attention to what the numbers say. Only to how it sounds. Even if the levels are going into the red on the channel, that doesn’t mean it’s clipping of the master is turned down.

It’ll get too much into the weeds if you mix with your eyes. That said, the OH levels are an interesting tidbit. But if it sounds fine, it doesn’t matter.

That's what I found odd with the OH levels. Was thinking I might just turn everything up by about 10db then ease off the limiter... but then I noticed that the overheads were at 0. Doesn't really matter though I don't tihnk.

[vomitHatSteve]

I tend to have a lot of preset submixes and stuff, but I never really pay attention to what the actual numbers are.

Oftentimes when building a mix fully from scratch, I'll start off by pulling everything down -4 dB and go from there.

[Greg_L]

I don't think the number on the fader matters much, if at all. In some DAWs you can set the range of the fader anyway. They can be almost whatever numbers you want them to be. They can be linear or logarithmic or whatever. The way I do my gain staging, I pretty regularly run my snare up around 0 on the fader and balance literally everything else around that. That's just my way of doing things.

What can and does sometimes matter is how the post fader signal level hits plugins. Some plugins are designed for a certain amount of input signal. If you're coming in too low or too hot the plug in might not work like it's supposed to.

[JD01]

I don't think the number on the fader matters much, if at all. In some DAWs you can set the range of the fader anyway. They can be almost whatever numbers you want them to be. They can be linear or logarithmic or whatever. The way I do my gain staging, I pretty regularly run my snare up around 0 on the fader and balance literally everything else around that. That's just my way of doing things.

What can and does sometimes matter is how the post fader signal level hits plugins. Some plugins are designed for a certain amount of input signal. If you're coming in too low or too hot the plug in might not work like it's supposed to.

I've noticed it mattering quite a lot with reverb. At one point I was adjusting a folder fader instead of track fader and I was essentially sinking the track back into its own reverb. Was weird and took me ages to work out what I was doing wrong.

[Armistice]

My snare usually ends up somewhere zero-ish, as do the overheads and everything else ends up where it needs to be, usually well south of zero apart from lead vocals which are also around there somewhere - but it depends how hot I've tracked guitars, bass etc.

I seem to have better results hitting target levels of LUFS etc. when mastering with lower levels on the faders. Quite often I just decrease every track by a few dB to get some more room.

[rayc]

If you're using a digital recorder and you've recorded a decent signal & left head room then, according to Kenny Gioia, the rest is flexible, turn up here and down further along the chain.
Greg's right about plugins/VSTs too. Clipping may happen inside them without any visual representation. I've checked the limited list of plugins I use and I'm pretty safe.