A complete guide to GAIN STAGING (your questions answered)

hello everyone my name is dylan pines with musician on a mission and today we are going to be talking about gain staging this mixing technique is one of the most controversial in the whole digital mixing world it's something that my students have asked me about for years and it's something that is one of the most misunderstood concepts that i find with my students week after week so i wanted to make an faq video that covers all the different questions that i get about gain staging hopefully by the end of this video you won't have any confusion over how exactly to do this extremely helpful technique so that you can move on with your life and make some much better mixes but before we get into it i want to let you know we are giving away a free bonus for today's video we're giving away our entire treasure trove of mixing cheat sheets we've been designing these over the past few years and there is some fantastic info in here stuff on eq and compression and reverb delay saturation volume balancing anything in between we've probably got it in this pack and we're giving it away free so if you'd like your own personal access just click the link on screen or down in the description below and we'll make sure to get one sent straight to you so let's start with the basics here's our first question what is gain staging and why does it matter now gain staging it does have a few definitions but for this video we're going to be focusing on the pre-mix process of changing the gain of all of your recordings so that they sit around the same level now really what this does it makes mixing faster it makes mixing easier and it makes plugins sound their best by putting your tracks in the fabled sweet spot now we're gonna cover what this means and how to do it throughout this video so sit tight so now let's move on to question number two is gain staging just volume balancing easy answer no it's not gain staging does not equal volume balancing and this is actually a common misconception among not only beginner producers and mixers but even into intermediate and advanced ones gain and volume are not the same thing so both of them describe amplitude right they describe the level of a track now the volume of a track is how loud that track is the level of that track after it's been processed but the gain is how loud a track is before it's been processed so basically gain is your input level but volume is your output level so changing your volume faders does not change the gain of your regions your channel's plugins aren't affected this is why we care about gain staging in the first place if i go to my vocals for example and i put on a compressor if i solo this instrument these vocals and i hit play and i start to turn down my volume fader right here you're going to be able to see that i'm going to still get the same amount of gain reduction that i got before nothing is really going to change rolling down the road you and me you see how i continue to get that compression that's because volume is my output level it is at the end of my signal flow now if i was to put this back where it was and i started to change the gain on the other hand then you're going to see less and less compression so i'm going to go in here before a compressor and this is just one of the ways that you can change up your gain i'm going to grab a gain plug-in and i'm going to start to turn this down and you're going to see that your compression is going to slowly decrease as i turn the gain down whereas with our volume fader that didn't happen at all rolling down the road you and me and the radio so the main takeaway from this section needs to be this changing your volume doesn't mean changing your gain if you turn your volume down your gain remains the same so that leads naturally into our next question how do you change a region's gain well there's generally two different ways you can see that i've actually already done one of them so one of them is to add a gain plug-in or a trim plug-in at the very top of a channel so the very first plug-in on an entire channel and as you turn up or down the gain that's going to change how much level is flowing into your plug-ins which is going to help you to get to that sweet spot that we're going to talk about later in the video if i was to take this plug-in this gain plug-in and turn it down by 5 dbs that my entire gain for this particular track is going to be turned down by 5 decibels now that is one way to do it the other way is by using your daw's gain system it's different for every daw so you might have to do a little bit of research on your own in logic pro it's up here in the little region area so you can see right here there's something that says gain and take a look at my waveform i'm going to increase the size of this if you can see as i decrease my gain my waveform decreases as well as i increase it my waveform increases that shows you that it's changing the level of the audio file itself not just the level of the overall channel so i'd recommend doing gain staging with whichever method works best for you for me i like using my daw's gain system just because i like to be able to see what it does to the waveform itself so now that you know how to change a region's gain there's the next obvious question what should you change the gain to what is this sweet spot that you've been hearing about throughout this video so the sweet spot that allows your plugins to work with their highest sound quality potential is 0 db vu or negative 18 dbfs but i'm not really a big fan of that method now i know that seems really specific like why is that the number that we're trying to gain sage to and what even is a vu meter well basically the plug-in sweet spot exists because most plugins are modeled after old analog technology from pro studios in the 20th century you know before the computer these analog preamps and compressors and eqs and so on they all used a different way of measuring volume than we do now they used the vu meter so if i go over here you actually can get vu meters in plug-in form so here's an example of one right here this is actually a free plug-in from a tb pro audio it's the mv meter 2 so you can get this at least at the time of recording this for free and this probably looks very familiar to you if you've seen any old analog gear you've probably seen vu meters on here now most of the old analog tech was calibrated so that it sounded its best whenever audio was flowing through it at around 0 dbvu so if it was sitting there on average you were gonna get the best possible sound quality since so many of our plugins are modeled after that tech they share that same sound quality sweet spot but we need to use a vu meter to find it so that's going to be our next faq question how do i use a vu meter to gain stage so here's what you're going to do you're going to put a vu meter plug-in onto your mixbus or your stereo output or whatever the final channel is in your daw so i'm gonna go over to my stereo output right here i'm gonna click and i'm gonna select mv meter two the next thing i'm gonna do is i'm gonna make sure that all of my tracks are set to zero they're set to unity i don't want anything turning up or down the volume of my regions the other thing i'm going to do is i'm going to make sure that all of my tracks are panned to the center i don't want anything panned to the sides if i can avoid it so now what you're going to do is you're going to solo one track at a time and you're going to loop the loudest part of the song for that specific instrument so for example let's look at this bass i'm going to solo this out and the loudest part of the song for this bass looks like it's probably around where i actually have this looping right now so i'm going to hit play and i'm going to change the gain on this track until it sits on average around 0 dbvu and that's really important to say on average going above 0 dbvu is expected that's totally okay you're not trying to get it to peak at that level you're trying to get it to sit there on average so i'm going to hit play and i'm going to start changing my gain until it looks right to me [Music] that's pretty darn close for me and remember this is not a hard and fast science you're really kind of just trying to get it into the ballpark of that area it doesn't have to be exactly sitting at on average 0 dbvu so for me i was finding that having my gain boosted up a little bit by about 1.5 dbs was really all i needed now let's check out for example this piano track okay so you know this one's peaking at around negative five so i'm gonna try turning it up by about five dbs and you can see that my waveform is increasing with it [Music] so for something like this you know it's such a dynamic instrument i'm not really going to be able to get it to sit fully on average around one particular spot because it's changing so dramatically so when this happens i do actually try to get it just to sort of peak somewhere around 0 dbvu that's totally fine again this is a soft science not a hard one now you just need to use this method for the tracks in your mix and you should have your plugins working at their highest potential but there's an obvious follow-up question to this why can't i just use my dos volume meter that's actually because it's a whole different way of measuring volume your dos volume meter is most likely a full scale meter also known as a peak meter or an fs meter so it actually reads volume a lot faster than a vu meter which makes it pretty difficult to gauge where a track is sitting on average at least when you're comparing it to our vu meter so you can see for example i'm peaking at around 0 db right but check out where i'm peaking on my actual volume channel for this piano picking at about negative 4.5 you know roughly around there now here's why for me this situation keeps me from wanting to use my daw's volume meter so in a vacuum 0 dbvu equals around negative 18 dbfs or db full scale you know you heard me say that earlier on in this video and you've probably heard other audio teachers on the internet say that as well you know they say oh you know you're trying to hit that digital sweet spot which is negative 18 dbfs but if i was to get this you know if i was to get this track gain stage this track so that it was sitting you know it was peaking around negative 18 dbfs well it's going to be peaking so quietly on my vu meter in my vu meter is the one that matters because that's the one that our sweet spot is actually based on let me show you what i'm talking about i'm going to try to get this to sit on average at about negative 18. [Music] so somewhere around there is probably good we're doing what we think we should on our full scale meter but we're only hitting about negative 10 dbvu over here on our actual vu meter so what that means is we're not actually hitting our digital sweet spot we're getting it on our fs meter but our full scale meter just doesn't matter as much as getting it on our vu meter so for me that's why i stick to using a vu meter and leave it at that now this brings up actually another question that i get asked all the time and this is actually the main reason why i wanted to make this video because this is a very common misconception if i'm gain staging my mix with a vu meter what should i do if a track starts to clip and i just want you to know this happens this is unfortunately not a perfect system the more extreme the dynamics of a particular recording is the higher your peak value or your fs value is going to be and the lower your vu value is going to be now that probably seems a little confusing so let me just show you what i'm talking about i'm going to go over here to my snare and i'm gonna solo this snare out and i want you to look at both my vu meter and my dbfs meter my peak meter you're going to see a dramatic difference between the two and your drums are a great example of where this system needs a little bit of tweaking [Music] okay so i'm peaking at about negative 3 dbfs but over here i'm only getting to about negative 8 dbvu so let's say i was going to turn up my gains that i'm getting around that 0dbvu sweet spot let's see what happens [Music] i am distorting like crazy right i'm getting about almost five dbs of clipping and that just barely got me up to zero dbvu so this is a situation where i am not going to be able to get this instrument into the digital sweet spot and that's okay most drums don't get to sit in the digital sweet spot that's because digital clipping wasn't a thing in the analog world so they didn't have to worry about it but you do so what i'd recommend instead is you just get them as close as you can to zero dbvu but leave yourself some headroom in fact i actually will often normalize my drum gain now that might sound a little freaky for anyone who doesn't really understand what normalizing is but basically the normalization process just sets the gain of each track so that it's peaking at a certain level so for me i kind of arbitrarily picked negative 6 dbs i don't want my drum gain to ever go above that amount that's going to give me enough headroom to feel confident in turning my drums up or down in the mix and knowing that they're not going to clip now every single daw has a different system for normalization so you might need to do a little bit of googling on your own but what i do for logic pro is i'll just grab all of my drums i'm going to go up to functions i'm going to go down to normalize region gain i'm going to select individual tracks or individual regions either one works i'm going to still keep my algorithm as peak and then i'm going to select my target level to be negative 6 dbs i'm going to make sure that i hit enter because that's going to actually lock it into place and then i'm going to hit apply and you can see right here my gain turned down quite a bit it's no longer in that huge peak zone it's actually been turned down by about negative 4.2 dbs now what that means is that's the closest i'm really going to be able to get this particular track to 0 dbvu and still have it be peaking at only negative 6 db fs now i know i'm throwing a lot of crazy vernacular at you really you can forget all these vocab words if you want they're hardly ever used unless we're talking about gain staging but the main thing to know is that your drums i would normalize them pick whatever number you want i usually go with negative 6 dbs because i just feel like that's a pretty decent amount of headroom just don't try to actually use a vu meter on hyper dynamic instruments because you're probably going to cause clipping so here's an important question when should i gain stage by tracks gain staging is 99 of the time a pre-mix technique you're going to want to do this before you ever start mixing that's because you don't want any of your channels to be turned to anything other than unity you know you want them to be set at zero dbs that's because you're going to want to get an accurate version of what your gain looks like also you don't want to have any plug-ins on your channels because if you change the gain of a plug-in you're going to change how that plug-in is acting it's the entire point of gain staging in the first place so if you do it before you start mixing you're going to be setting yourself up with a fantastic foundation to build upon but if you do it halfway through your mix you're just going to absolutely wreck your mix it's going to cause total chaos all of a sudden tracks where you're maybe getting two or three dbs of compression you're suddenly getting 10 dbs of compression or tracks where you've got a decent amount of saturation on them you're suddenly getting no saturation because the gain is too quiet so you definitely want to make sure that you're doing this first if you're in the middle of a mix right now don't worry about doing it on this mix just start doing it on the next mix so here's another common question do i have to gain stage all of my tracks and the answer to this is no you don't here's my rule of thumb the more plugins a track will use the better it will sound if you gain stage the recording so if you're going to be doing a lot of processing on a particular track then i would absolutely gain stage it but if it's something that's really quiet and it's meant to be in the background and you know you're not really gonna do much of anything on it then don't worry about it it's okay you can totally skip that one like for example i often won't gain stage my tambourines because i know they're gonna be just a very quiet background instrument if i know that i'm going to do a lot of compression and eq and saturation on them then i definitely am going to gain stage them because i want them to sound the best they can so on to our next question do i have to gain stage my midi tracks this is something that i hear tons from people who are doing either home studios you know where they're doing virtual instruments that they just don't have access to recording or electronic producers or pop producers who are using stuff like synths or samples so again i've got to go back to my rule of thumb the more plugins a track is going to use the better it will sound if you gain stage it so if it's a really really background synthesizer i wouldn't stress too hard over it but if it's a big synth lead or maybe it is a virtual drum set or maybe it's a whole bunch of samples that you're going to be compressing then i would definitely take the time to gain stage now if you're using midi you can't really gain stage that using your daw's gain staging system it doesn't really have gain it's just information it's not a recording so instead you would want to either go into your software into your virtual instrument and change the volume there or you would just want to add a gain plug-in to the very top of your actual plug-in chain the very top of your channel so let me show you an example of what i'm talking about okay so i have a quick synth patch that i made we actually pull it up and let's just take a look on our vu beater and see how loud it is so it's sitting on average at about negative 6 dbvu so instead of actually going in here and changing the gain on my midi file which i can't do i'm just going to go to the volume which is remember just the output level of my synth and i'm just going to turn it up until it's sitting at around 0 db [Music] perfect nice and simple so you can either do that or you can just use the gain method and put a gain plug in at the very top of that particular channel and turn it up or down that way so another common question that i get how long should gain staging take preferably not long at all the first time you do it you know it might take you some time because you're getting used to it but the next time you do it will take you less time and the next time even less time at a certain point you want to get to a level where you're able to knock it out in probably 10 minutes unless you have just a ton of tracks if you start taking more than that then you're just using valuable mixing time and honestly it's not really worth taking hours and hours just to make sure you're getting a little bit more quality out of your plugins and our final question is this what about gain automation i've heard that's the secret sauce of gain staging you know honestly it is it's fantastic especially for compression but it's pretty complicated so it's something that i want to be covering in more detail in another video so be on the lookout for that but if i was to describe it in just a few seconds gain automation is basically the process where you are going through a particularly dynamic instrument like for example your vocals and instead of changing the gain for the whole instrument you are actually splitting different regions up like this and changing the gain for individual regions that way the gain for each phrase in a particular song is around the same level this is great because it allows your compression to be sitting at the same intensity the entire song instead of having maybe one phrase have a ton of compression and another phrase have very little at all it's also very helpful for instruments where one section of the song they might be very quiet in another section of the song it's very very loud you're gonna have very inconsistent compression that way so like i said we're gonna be covering that in another video coming up so keep your eye out for that so that's going to about wrap it up these are the most frequent questions that i'm asked about gain staging but these aren't all the questions that i've been asked if you have any other gain staging questions leave them in the comments below they might make their way into a future video and before you head out don't forget we are giving away a huge free bonus on this video our entire collection of designed mixing cheat sheets make sure to click the link on screen or down in the description to get your own free access this is stuff that honestly i will even use each time i mix in fact keep your eye out for the eq balance chart the thing that goes over the frequency spectrum it is maybe my favorite thing that musician on a mission has ever created it's something that i use every single time i mix also if you're new here don't forget to like and subscribe we make tutorials just like this one every single week on this channel and we would honestly love to help you grow in any way we can so that's going to about wrap it up for me this has been dylan pines with musician on a mission and remember create regardless [Music] you

Channel: Musician on a Mission

Views: 174,078

Rating: 4.9512644 out of 5

Keywords: musician on a mission, rob mayzes, home studio, home recording, gain staging

Id: Tq5lDHCKt84

Length: 25min 14sec (1514 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 01 2021