Should I normalize?

Hi People Yesterday, a friend of mine came round so we could experiment with testing/comparing a couple of studio microphones and a pre-amp for vocals. We basically just recorded my voice over a verse and chorus or two of one of my (unmixed) songs in various mic combinations. Anyway, the thing that surprised me is that the first thing my friend wanted to do to each recorded vocal was to normalize them. And, he said, that's what he does to everything he records. (I've read ReaMix a couple of times, and it talks about first getting a rough mix by zeroing the faders and setting levels in each recorded item's "Media Items Properties" box. For a start, I seem to find that concept hard to get my head around, although I'm sure it's perfect advice. To me, that seems kind of like a broad normalizing, and it's something I wouldn't have thought of. Although, bare in mind I don't have half as much engineering experience as the author!) Is proper normalizing every recorded track good practice? (Thanks for taking the time to read this essay!)

Thanks for that, Captain, that makes complete sense. Cheers

Another reason to not do it: normalizing doesn't increase the resolution of the recording. If you record too low, those bits are lost forever, so adjust the mic preamp gain instead.

Normalization rarely, if ever, makes any sense. It doesn't improve signal to noise because it is simply raising the volume of the entire track, noise and all. If you bring a single track up to 0db how can you add any other tracks without going over 0 db? So you will now have to lower the volume with the track fader. So, where is the purpose?

I recommmend normalizing recordings (=audio-events) in Reaper. It's completely non-destructive here and gives you a good starting point. Please note that many dynamic processors won't work properly if their input is too low. They expect peaks of ~0DB. If different takes/snippest are still to heterogen after normalizing then you can still hand-adjust their gain. But normalizing usually will put you in the ballpark.

I don't think I have ever normalised anything that doesn't sound horrendous. Well what I should say is that I don't think that I have ever normalised anything that hasn't made an already bad recording horrendously worse. 'horrendously worse'...can you say that?

huh??? Making a bad recording worse? It's just a gain-adjustement for Christ's sake, and in Reaper a non-destructive (@64bit) at that. You can undo/modify it at any time from within the 'properties'-popup.

m'kay... :)

I'm with Jens on this one. Some of these responses are pretty remarkable. If I were comparing vocal mics I'd want the clips to be roughly the same volume ... so I'd normalize them. Why not????? It's exactly the same as adjusting the gain by any other method in terms of its impact on the file. Think about it for a moment and realize that you don't have to normalize to 0dB. Put the peak at -12dB if that makes sense for the use of the tool. After all, that's what we're talking about here, a tool not a mystical experience. Fran

NO! Normalizing does not set the level of two clips the same! It sets the highest peaks the same. This will be different with for two different performances and other factors such as a differnt mic. If you really feel you need to have exactly the same volume on two clips in order to evaluate gear or whatever, put the clips on separate tracks and adjust the track level so they both show the same RMS value in the master meter.