Bitwig Studio & Music Production Course - 1.05 - Analog: Audio, Metering, Distortion
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I made a stupid mistake when explaining relative levels. dbSPL is a logarithmic function. Meaning that (and here's where I screwed up) if you take an identical sound source and lower it by 40db perceptually it will sound 100 times quieter than the original signal. I said 20db which is incorrect. The maths is all rather complicated but it means that making a subtle change of 1 or 2 db will be almost imperceptible as compared to a change of 10 or 20 db which will be super obvious and noticeable. Here's a picture showing a logarithmic curve. To be 100% clear this image does not directly correlate to dbSPL but should give you an idea of what's happening.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia...
Picking up where we left off in the last video, I try to explain some of the differences between analog and digital signals. For this particular lesson I used Ableton Live for the example because it has a better analog modeled saturation plugin.
I know I didn't do the best job explaining these particular concepts but trust me it's a tough thing to really understand and explain. What I hope you get out of this is that you can push an analog system into the red without introducing the sort of shear harshness and dissonance of digital clipping. Instead, the result will often times be very pleasing and desirable. If it wasn't people wouldn't swear by analog systems like they do :)
Of course you need to remember that most plugins inside the computer are simply emulations and will not reproduce an "authentic" analog sound but rather an estimation of the desired effect. Code is code and continuous signal is continuous signal, that is the crux of analog verses digital.
Tomorrow I'll post a comment under the video recapping the main points I was trying to make.
Here are a ton of resources to dig into if your interested.
Metering
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun00...
Analog Signal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_s...
Analog vs Digital
http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/...
University of Wisconsin on Decibels
http://trace.wisc.edu/docs/2004-About...
Decibel 10th App (not 100% accurate but free and fun)
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/decib...
VU Meters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VU_meter
Understanding dB
http://www.jimprice.com/prosound/db.htm
Analogue Warmth (Advanced)
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/feb10...
Distortion in the Studio
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr10...