The Pro Producer's Guide To Headroom and levels

How loud can you go? Where's your head(room) at? Why do you have to be careful with levels? Here's our guide to signal-to-noise ratio, gain staging, headroom and a lot more as we continue our Back To Basics journey through some of the first principles of music production...

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The world of music production is often about making things bigger, pushing the envelope and getting everything 'on the limit'. It's clear, then, that in the wrong hands your track could be heading into the danger zone. The world of digital audio levels is an unforgiving place that, unlike the warm analogue love afforded by classic gear, will shred your track and turn it into nonsense if you overstep a single dB mark.

So here's the trick: give your track lots of digital space (known as headroom) to manoeuvre in, build signal chains (known as gain staging), that allow you to add sounds together (known as summing) in a pleasing fashion while keeping noise low.

Digital headroom is the breathing space we leave in a track, as opposed to trying to push all our levels as high as possible. But do peak indicators matter? Is it OK to clip channels? How do you set the master output level? We'll be answering these questions and more. There are two major aspects of digital headroom we need to look at: recording and mixing.

Recording is straightforward: you get an analogue signal into your DAW as a digital recording, so for example, you sing into a microphone and it's recorded in your computer.

Next comes mixing, which in this case doesn't just refer to the final mixdown process after composing and producing your track. Most electronic music producers mix as they go to some extent, so if we're using summing stages and effects as part of our production technique we also need to consider the effect they're having on headroom and the overall sound. Let's start off with getting the sound into your DAW in the first place and see exactly how headroom affects recording.

Signal-to-noise ratio explained

All because tape had to be hit as hard as possible to avoid noise interference