Understanding recording techniques

Yesterday, I spent some time thinking about guitar pedals, which was a big adventure. My guitar pedal collection just keeps growing. My recording setup for the Lindahl Letter had some sort of glitch this morning. I had to turn up the volume on my Yeti X microphone and turn down the noise gate to record this week's episode. I’m actually considering going back and recording it again at some point to see if I can improve the audio quality a little bit. The audio is overall fine, but it is slightly off in some way.

I’m not entirely sure what setting got changed to make things different in GarageBand, but something is definitely different. My project is set up for a narration vocal, and I have barely any ambience or reverb turned on within the project, like half a tick of both. By half a tick, I mean it is exactly halfway between completely turned off and the first tick in the settings. Maybe the recording level was set to automatic before, or something changed in either the recording level or maybe the microphone audio level got changed somehow.

I have already recorded the entire audio a second time and turned up the Yeti X microphone level by two little blue dots, which took my audio level just up to the yellow section when I was speaking, but nowhere near the red of clipping. My experience includes several years of setting up audio recording using Audacity. It is a much different recording experience than GarageBand. I’m trying to learn how to use GarageBand and set up recording using my MacBook Air. I like the interface a little bit better and assuming that I start recording more guitar tones it is the right software to move to instead of Audacity.