Logic Pro - Mixing with 1 track in the red?

red is too much output, you can't unclip a track, try adjusting your inputs, you may want to "hit" red when you peek but you don't want t keep it there. Play your piece and adjust the levels until you just graze red at your loudest part and the rest of the track stays under the mark. Once set you can record, now play the same thing you just did!

also consider verb and eq in post recording if you haven't already, it will give you far more flexibility down the road when you mix, the fewer effects you layer when you record the more you can add later, there are exceptions but when recording reverb is not your friend, reverb is fake mustaches for little boys or mommy heels for girls at tea parties (Stephen King) as raw as you can record then add all that stuff later. You think Hendrix walked into the studio with a wall of effects boxes? That was a righty strat strung lefty, and a marshal plexi turned up to 10 with mic's all over the room, and he wore baseball cleats! (Eddie Kramer/Me, speculating)

If you have excessive hum

1) turn off/down overhead lighting especially if you are using a single coil pickup.

2) try a different pickup or look into what you can do with what you have (single coil pickups are noise magnets when it comes to grounding), some guitars are just dang noisy.

3) adjust your effects or amp gain, while it's fun to sound like Tony Iommi and Max Cavalera and Brian Hayner all giving birth to a new distortion pedal at the same time it's difficult to capture it without sounding like a giant bumble bee until you get the hang of recording.

4) look into an external noise gate or see this document

https://documentation.apple.com/en/logicstudio/effects/index.html#chapter=4%26se ction=10%26tasks=true

5) A compressor can be used pre or post mix, like all things you can just plug it in and walk away.

http://www.premierguitar.com/articles/21690-the-recording-guitarist-dances-with- compressors

try rerecording the track or recording another track and disabling the one affected.

An occasional over on a single channel strip is fine, the only thing that matters is the main stereo output - that should never clip. The mixer in Logic has about + 1500 dB headroom, because of how it is mathematically set up (32 bit floating point). This means In the mixer audible clipping only happens if you use plugins with less headroom than that (24 or even less bit fixed point). Typically these are plugins that emulate hardware, such as Guitar Amp simulations or Stomp Box simulations.

It is considered good practice to avoid clipping anywhere though, but in this case it sounds fine.

Isn't it simple as that?: Recording, never in the red. Output, never in the red. What happens inside Logic isn' t that problematic. And a file for mastering should have about -6db headroom. But Logic (and others) don't help. Every loop, every instrument is so loud. Soon you'll be in the red and distorting. Most of the time when I receive a mix, I have to deal with that. Then I shift-click all tracks in the mixer and turn down the volume. (But if the mix contains a lot of volume automation, I'm f.....) So, turn it down, down! It's not like analogue tape, where you have to deal with signal/noise ratio, meaning, you have to record as loud as possible, to override the hiss and hum....

No, it's not a problem in the channel strip, it's almost impossible to distort Logic internally, however, as you surmise, the master output should never go over 0db. Most Mastering studios like some headroom but using 24-bit mixes, it doesn't present the problems that plagued the industry a few years ago.

Logic's internal audio pathways use a combination of 32 bit float and 64 bit "where applicable". Overs in the channel strip do not present a problem, you don't want to make a habit of it but the fact is, you could mix with several channels popping into the red and not produce any distortion as long as the Master out remained below 0db.

Pancenter and Eric have answered this question perfectly. If you'd like a little bedtime reading I wrote this some time ago... https://paulsmithblog.wordpress.com/2014/11/27/24-bit-recording/

J2011 wrote:

basically because it was no longer in the stack it wasn't taking volume instructions from the main stack volume anymore and therefore was back to it's normal volume. Infact it was a lot louder and therfore needed to be brought down a few db's, No more red!

as I say.. I'm learning but thanks for all the other info, it's certainly helpful to know what to look out for and what not to do when recording and mixing. 😉

Also, there was never any sound degradation even if a channel does go in the red, it's important to understand Logic's internal audio/mixing engine has so much headroom that internal overs do not present the same problems that analog gear does, or even older digital equipment that had far less internal resolution.