Hardware compressor

[kara]

As I've explained I'm basicaly a hardware guy, no PC & software involved in the recording stage.

Now during recording of our last song, I've been confronted with a problem on which I would like some advice.
I'm recording the voice of the lady with a dynamic mic and a pre-amp directly in my BOSS BR660 mulitrack recorder.

My lady not only has a big tonal range in her voice but allso a very big dynamic range (from whispering until shouting )
My problem is to capturing here voice, if I level the input on the quiter parts it clips when she goes off and if I level on the louder parts, the quit parts are too silent.
The br660 has a software compressor (CMOS effect) which you can put in the input chain but it doesn't seem to do very well. I think there isn't enough fine tuning on it. If i put the attack time to long, well I still have unwanted peaks in the recording and if i put it to short it starts pumping (in my ears)

So, I guess the only good solution would be hardware compressor between the pre-amp and the br....
Is this right or do I miss something here ?

If this is right, any advice on brands and models ? No +1000 dollar gear please 

k

[rharv]

Record it so she doesn't clip and try the PGDynamic compressor in your DAW. It's a fine compressor. The Classic Compressor plugin is easier- it comes with a great vocal preset, you pretty much just have to adjust the compression amount and the volume.
 I thought she worked the mic pretty well on the last song.

 I just ordered an ART Tube MP Studio. It has a limiter in it, which may actually be what you are wanting as opposed to a compressor. The limiter will juts tame the peaks that try to go over the clip level.
 I'll let you know how I like it once it gets here. They are on sale for only $35 inc shipping here right now.  No idea how thay can do that with a 12AX7A tube in a preamp with phantom power! Thye must have found an extra truckload of them when they moved the warehouse!.

[kara]

Thanks, let me know what your experiences are with it 

k

[rharv]

Had a little time to tinker with the ART Tube MP studio version preamp.
 It is a nice preamp, an extremely good deal. It was $29 at musiciansfriend.com (plus shipping of course)
 I notice a slight touch of warmth, nothing dramatic, but the depth stands out to me.  I hear the room much more than with my Delta1010lt mic preamps and slightly more than with the MX3282 preamps.
 It is pretty quiet as tube preamps go, at least in my experience. I've sent a couple back because of unacceptable noise levels, this one is staying right here.  Might try to figure out how to sneak another one into the budget since they are such a value.
 It is possible to get it to generate some noise if you engage the +20dB feature, then crank the pregain almost all the way and boost the output a lot...but this would cause a huge clipping situation here if any mic I own was engaged at the time.  I haven't yet put it thru the paces for a high impedance input.  I will try to get to that today, maybe run the bass thru it to see what it does.

It was a small noticable change on the LCD I used (48volt Phantom power worked well), but a much bigger difference on the SM57. I like what it did for that mic. Brought it to life quite a bit, and I already liked that mic to begin with.

The limiter feature isn't going to be of much use here. It seems pretty abrupt and more to get your attention so you know you are over driving signals than to be for a musical use.  I will say that to get the limiter to start kicking in you have to really be driving the signal hard, so it's a good thing that it's there to protect equipment down the line, it's just not a musical limiter/compressor type thing I would want to use in-line for signal gain/control.
 When the limiter kicks in (at 0dB on the unit's VU meter) you are pushing approx. +6dBu at the 1/4" out and +12dBu at the XLR out, so it's going to work fine for protecting mixers and other live/analog equipment...not so much for digital stuff.
 It was easy to pin the meters in my soundcard with very little noise from this preamp. I give it both thumbs up for what it does at the price it is at.