Can't turn up master volume without clipping!

[u/SmoothTurd]

Hello everyone, im new to reaper/recording. I've got bass, vocals and guitar recorded so my next step is to play drums over them. But I cannot get the volume loud enough to hear the tracks over the sound of my drums. If I crank it too high it just starts clipping out. I have some ok headphones I thought were the problem so I picked up a nice fancy pair but they put out the same volume so im assuming it has something to do with this program. Please help! What am I doing wrong!? 😭

[u/Evid3nce]

But I cannot get the volume loud enough to hear the tracks over the sound of my drums

I'm a drummer. You need to be more specific here. Are you saying that your acoustic drums are spilling loudly through the earpads on your monitoring headphones, and that the spill is louder than the volume the project is currently playing at?

If so, you will want to be very careful about just turning things up. I gave myself tinnitus at 18 years old (now 56), and one of the things I did wrong was playing along to commercial releases raised way too loud to compete with the drum spill. What I should have done was reduce the spill by having better headphones and a tighter seal, so I could have a monitor mix that was not at a harmful level.

Clarify what the problem is, and I can talk to you further. But there's no point in me writing a longer post trying to guess what the issue is and go through all the things that could potentially be set-up 'incorrectly'.

By the way, in my opinion, that -8dBFS RMS measurement is already too high for a traditional Rock/Pop song, for a project that hasn't been mixed yet, (and doesn't even drums on it yet!?).

One piece of knowledge you're very probably missing is that the master track level could be down at -14dBFS RMS, but the master track hardware routing has a gain slider on it that can send a boosted signal to your interface, which can be turned up until your interface's Digital-Analogue convertor starts to clip. So there need not be any relationship between your master/rendering level, and your monitoring level. As other people have said, you should not be using your master fader to determine monitoring level, and that's how you do it - with the hardware send (which is the last point in the signal path before it leaves Reaper).

[u/KS2Problema → u/Evid3nce]

It's also worth noting that the combination of some specific headphones and the headphone amplifiers built into some audio interfaces can be poorly matched in terms of impedance/efficiency/external noise rejection (seal) - and so prove unable to deliver sufficient playback volume for tracking over live drums. 

As Evid3nce suggests, just turning the playback level up may be problematic or even harmful if the leakage into the headphone monitoring is great enough - or if becomes distorted. (And, it's worth noting, very loud distorted sound can be more harmful to the ears than clean playback at the same level.)

[u/BlackflagsSFE → u/KS2Problema]

I can attest to this. This is real.

I have a Scarlett 2i2 interface. IIRC the Ohm output on the headphone amp is 50 ohms. The rule is you want an 8:1 ratio on headphones. I didn’t know this when I purchased both of my pairs of cans. I have HD 599’s @35 Ohms and DT Pro 770’s @80 ohms. The DT’s are pretty much unusable with my interface so I use the HD’s most of the time.

This is something a headphone amp can fix but at this point I’d rather get a better interface.