Ahh yes, I like Graham a lot.
What do you think is the best approach for the OP then Nicky?
Yours, Shawn.
For one thing, Misha's gonna have to dial those levels back on every track if he intends to use any sort of decent analogue-console / compressor / EQ in plugin form. The most-authentic of this popular "genre" of plugins are tuned to expect lower-level input, thus more-accurately representing the gear they're emulating.
Further to this, sending these hot signals through series of plugins (common on every channel these days) is inviting trouble unless, again, you lower the levels going to them. That involves an uneccesary stage of processing IMHO 'cause you wouldn't have to insert a gain-changing plugin if you hadn't have recorded so hot in the first place. We're all gonna use a bunch of plugins on everything ultimately, and each stage of processing introduces errors which accumulate within and across tracks, so no need to add an extra one for every instrument track, no?
Worrying about the noise floor, as he describes it when justifying his old-school-hangover technique, is frankly-ridiculous for a number of reasons. Most-obviously, the high-gain tones he's using would inherently contain heaps of noise, and nobody could possibly hear the added -100+dB that's gonna be introduced by recording at much-lower levels. In addition to that, the guitar parts should ideally be gated or the soudfiles chopped up so that zero noise appears between passages / phrases. Basic engineering.
Lastly, recording all your signals hot invites all sorts of other potential problems to the mix, IMHO. Inter-sample clipping, for instance, which wouldn't get a look in if sufficient headroom is available to accommodate the inter-sample peaks that cause it. Suffocation (sounding tiny) of the mix due to too many channels' being too-hot. The latter is a huge issue IMHO, and requires great effort to ameliorate sometimes, usually through resetting all track levels a whole-lot lower (hello more number crunching). This inability of a mix to breathe properly (openness, size) as well as express transients "effortlessly" is sabotaged in no small way by using hotly-recorded tracks IMHO.
To sum up, whilst I like his monitors (Opals - my favourites!), I believe his level-setting M.O. is archaic and his good intentions therefrom misplaced. This is all just MHO, and folks' MMV and so on.
