10x Better MIX! | How to Gain Stage in Fl Studio | Waves VU Meter

[Music] Rick on them keys and them [Music] kick hey what up y'all it's Young Rick with Westside level welcome to the greatest mixing podcast in the world thank you for joining us today we have a very important topic and that topic is gain staging now what is gain staging before we get into what game staging is we have to understand a concept called clipping now to demonstrate this concept of clipping to you I'm going to actually uh pull up uh this beat and play it for you now as I uh play this beat I want you to pay attention to this plugin right here this V U meter but if you don't have this plugin also you can pay attention in the upper right corner to this me uh not this meter but this meter right here that my mouse is circling around so notice what happens when I play the [Music] beat all right so if you look at the meters both the Vu meter and the meter in the upper right corner showing our volume we can see that the volume of our signals have reached up to Red well what is going into the red mean well let's pull up our uh mixer real quick and then fix our attention on this main meter in our left corner that my mouse is circling around as I press play you'll notice if we look at these numbers that our signal is going past zero anytime it's going to go past zero that means our signal is going to go into red what does the red indicate the red indicate that the signal is clipping okay so when you see red lights you're more than likely clipping your doll now what happens why don't we want to clip we don't want to clip because when you do clip audio is going to add an unwanted Distortion to your mix it's important to not clip it's because we want to avoid unwanted Distortion okay so we just to wrap up everything we talked about if it goes past zero in our do digital audio workstation for right now this is Fruity Loops then it Clips the signal the all the channels together clips when the signal Clips it adds unwanted Distortion okay I hope that concept was pretty easy to wrap your head around now now that we got the concept of how the dog can clip let's talk about what else can clip plugins and Hardware can actually clip so just like how a doll has in a head room of zero and when you go past zero it starts to clip once you start to get into um once you start to get into Hardware mixing with Hardware like compressors eqs outside gear and you start getting into mixing with plugins that emulate Hardware what you're going to have to realize about the hardware is that just like how the dog can be clipped those units can be clipped and they add Distortion when they're clipped so this might be the reason if you if you bought plugins and then you put them on your mix and you're like they never sound good your plug your signal your instruments might be hitting the plugins a little too hard hitting them at a too high of a volume so what do we do to fix that what technique do we do to fix that we gain stage what is gain staging gain staging is simply adjusting the volume for the next St stage of the mix so hey we're going to adjust the volume because now we know that all of our channels are about to go inside of this Hardware compressor or hey we're about to adjust the volume because we know all of our channels are about to go into this Plugin or hey we're about to adjust the volume the gain because we know that we're getting close to our uh zero Headroom limit on our master all right what I'm I'm going to do is just on the channel rack use this uh Channel volume right here this channel volume knob to turn the volume down and that way by the time all of my instruments hit the mixer they'll be at the correct volume I want one thing else I want to talk about is uh what Headroom you pick I'm going to pick 18 that's where I'm going to want all of my instruments sitting at at Unity gain why do I pick 18 well simply because I use hard Hardware emulated plugins like this SSL Channel strip that you see right here and in the manual I'm not going to pull up the manual you're just going to have to take my word for it it says that -18 decimals is the zero equals z Vu which means that that's the starting point point that you want your um that you want your signals coming into this SSL Channel plugin at to get a proper Distortion now if if there or a proper saturation out of it now if I want to add more color to it within the plugin I could just use its own preamp but that'll be a later tutorial for different time I just wanted to explain this now let's go ahead and assign all of our tracks to the mixer and remember we're not going to touch any plugins I'm actually turn this off we're going to just use our Channel volume to gain stage and get our signals at a nice healthy volume before we even put any plugins on all right with that being said no more talking straight game [Music] staging [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so simple and easy what you just seen and what you just experienced was me actually gain station a actual mix that's actually how easy it is and like how I said I highly recommend doing this because even if you weren't using a um SSL Channel Plugin or Hardware emulated plug-in let's say you was using something like uh fruity balance as your first insert to level and everything like that it's much more refreshing when all the instruments are sitting at Unity gain that way you can actually create a level a lot of people don't talk about it but when a balance is kind of all over the place like we had it before at the beginning of this mix sometimes a engineer will just let a instrument sit where it's at without moving it or adjusting its gain and they'll be like oh well I like where it's sitting just because that's where it is but you didn't test any other places to sit the that let's hypothetically say it was a piano you didn't test any places to sit your piano at you just left it out of whack and turned it maybe turned it down a little bit to get it to fit into your mix but see here where everything's at Unity gain there is no we're starting at a point where we're starting at it so we're just going to let it sit no everything's at unity game Let's create our mix we're going to create it from here we're going to create the type of balance we want with everything at unity game another thing I want you to notice is that when um it's at Unity [Music] gain all of our plugins if I turn you'll notice that all of my plugins are off but if I turn them all on on right now the level will not change it'll still be at the same [Music] level very beautiful way to start a mix also I want you to notice on our Master Channel with our hair [Music] room now remember at the beginning of this mix we were past zero it was going way past three now we're sitting under six so we have enough headro to put a EQ or a compressor on the master and give it a little bit more of a push um so yeah you can buy yourself a lot of headro you could you just move a lot more advanced when you uh gain stage one last thing I want to show you that I do is I do use this um once you gain stage and do everything right you could use a v meter instead of a peak meter to actually monitor your mix just make sure that it's calibrated at the head room so remember when we gain staged I chose 18 decimals um of Headroom so when I go to my Vu meter I'm going to make sure where it says head room I choose 18 now had I did 15 uh if I put everything at Unity at 15 then I will go my Vu meter and I would put everything at Unity at 15 but it's at 18 right now that was just an example so now what can a Vu meter do well a peak meter is going to show us exactly where the signal is peaking at it but a Vu meter is kind of going to give us an interpretation on how our here is actually hear the mix so let's see where our mix is just sitting at Unity gang [Music] perfect we're right under zero our Vu meters are looking good you notice the the Vu meter wasn't clipping our uh Peak meters are looking good and then as a extra bonus I'mma show you a a kick and base leveling trick that you can use with a Vu meter um when you're starting off your mixes so now let's say you got everything gain stage you're ready to get into your mix we're just going to pull up the 808 now pulling up this [Music] 808 now my goal with this 808 is to get it sitting at the three on the Vu meter so that that's what I'm going to go ahead and attempt to do right [Music] now now once your 80a is hitting at three on the Vu meter then I'll take my kick drum add that into the mix pull it up and then I'll raise the kick drum till the Vu meter is now hitting at about [Music] zero we got the 808 sitting at three and then the 808 with the kick now that's hitting at [Music] zero we have a perfectly balanced lowend so now we we could turn the Vu meter off and we can just go straight into our mix and start leveling uh just using these regular Peak meters on FL Studio um so that's the tutorial if you have any questions about what we talked about today or any suggestions for new um mixing tips leave them in the comment section give me a like if this was a raw ass video y'all be smooth gone

Channel: Westside Level

Views: 4,651

Keywords: westside level, riq, how to gain stage, how to gain stage in fl studio, fl studio, fl studio 21, how to gain stage in fl studio 21, waves vu meter, how to balance kick and 808, how to balance kick and bass, how to use waves vu meter, waves vu meter explained, gain staging, clipping, digital cliping, plugin cliping, clipping waves plugins, how to mix, how to start a mix in fl studio, waves vu meter in fl studio, waves vu meter fl studio, waves meter plugins, meter plugins

Id: 0JPU8A1mdzg

Length: 15min 45sec (945 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 26 2024