GAIN AUTOMATION (the secret sauce of compression)

hello hello dylan pines here with musician on a mission and today we're going to be talking about one of the biggest industry secrets for getting pro level compression we are going to be talking about gain automation it's an amazing way to get a consistent compression tone across an entire song for all of your instruments 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 with that said let's dive straight in and talk about gain automation so gain automation is basically where you automate the gain level of an audio file so that it averages around the same level throughout the song let me break that down into plain english now we're talking about the gain level you know that's the amplitude the level the loudness of our individual audio tracks or individual audio files or regions not the level of our channels that's our volume volume automation and gain automation are not the same thing so if we're automating the gain level of our audio file that means that we're going to be changing the audio file itself so that we have a more consistent performance across the entire song the obvious question that comes up after this is why should i care well this is a huge secret for getting pro level compression especially for professional vocals stuff that is really really dynamic basically if a track is really inconsistent and level it's not going to be compressed the same way throughout the song for example let's look at this vocal so you can see that in this part of the chorus it's extremely loud i'm gonna actually solo it out so you can hear it and when the song hits hard with the drums and guitars the world explodes but then at a different part of the song earlier on in the verse it's much much quieter time slows when you get close to the horizon so if we were to put a compressor on this where would we set our threshold so let's look at what this looks like on a compressor i've got a compressor here that i've got preset up and we're gonna see it's getting you know three or four dbs of gain reduction at the loud moments check this out and when the song hits hard with the drums and guitars the world explodes to the great divine but if we take this to our quieter moment we're not going to get hardly anything time slows when you get close to the horizon compression is going to change the tone of the instrument and if it's set up well it's going to change it for the better but if you have an inconsistent performance where a certain part is very quiet and a certain part is very loud then you're going to have not only inconsistent dynamics but also an inconsistent tone because your compressor is going to be working wildly differently depending on the part of the song that you're on this happens not only in vocals but also in just any dynamic instrument so for example let's look at this organ so up here you can see that during the verse it's a little bit quieter but during the choruses it gets quite a bit louder so if i was wanting to compress this i would really struggle because i would have to compress it so that it was getting the right amount of compression for the loud moments but then i would get almost no compression for the quiet moments so what can i do to fix this gain automation i can automate the level of my gain so that i'm getting consistent compression throughout the song now before i show you what this looks like i do want to point out something gain automation is not the same thing as volume automation gain does not equal volume there are two different words that describe the same thing amplitude level the loudness of a sound but gain is the level at the beginning of a signal chain and volume is the level at the end of that signal chain so the loudness of our individual region that's our gain but the loudness of our channel that's our volume and since we're going to be affecting what our plug-ins here we want to change our gain because if we change our volume that's not going to change anything that is going into the plugins that's just changing what is getting sent out of the channel if you remember nothing else from this video remember that gain equals input level and volume equals output level so let's talk about how to actually do gain automation now we're actually going to start off looking at our organ instead of at our vocals just because it's a little bit more of a simpler example and really quickly i do want to point out i'm going to be doing this using logic pro and logic pro's way of affecting gain now every daw has a different way of doing this so i would do a little bit of google research on your own just researching your daw's name gain automation and you'll find how your daw allows you to do this but here's what i'm going to do i am going to look at my region and i'm going to find the the different sections that are obviously smaller than other sections like for example this intro this verse going into this louder chorus and i'm going to hold down my command key and you can see when i do that this little plus pops up now what this is is basically my marquee tool is what that's known as and it allows me to select different parts of a region or multiple regions and whenever i click on this selection it splits it into its own region this is an extremely helpful tool for many many different mixing techniques but for this moment it's great because it allows us to change the individual gain of just this individual spot so what i'm going to do i'm going to go over to my region drop down box which is right here and you can see there's a little function labeled gain now i want you to look at the waveform whenever i move gain up and down so you can see as i increase the level of the gain the waveform increases and as i decrease the level of the gain the waveform decreases what's great about this system is that i can basically just use my eyes to do my gait automation you know this is a soft science it's not a hard science i'm not trying to get this exactly perfectly right i'm just kind of trying to get everything in the same ballpark you know the same general loudness and so i'm able to use my eyes and just say like okay cool that's that's probably pretty close and then go in and solo it and listen and see if your eyes and your ears agree so for me that was actually just a little bit too loud so i'm just going to take it down by one dbs and call it a day i would want to do this pretty much across the board on all of these individual sections and it's important to say whenever you're doing something so broad like this you're wanting to pick sections not necessarily moments so i would want to go in here for example and cut out this whole section and increase that rather than going in here cutting out this moment and then cutting out this other moment separately because the more i subdivide it into just different parts of a performance the more difficult it's going to be to keep it sounding natural so let me really quickly go and actually do my gain automation for all of these sections i'm not going to actively try too hard to get it right obviously you would want to go back and listen to it and make sure that it sounds correct but i'm going to say that that's pretty good so i'm going to grab these four regions because i already got this first one i'm going to turn the gain up a little bit until everything's kind of in the right area we're gonna say that's good and then what i'm gonna do is i'm going to select all of my regions and i'm going to add some cross fades so what crossfades are is they basically will automate the level of one region you know the region on the left they'll automate it down while at the exact same time automating the level of the region on the right up it basically keeps you from having any kind of weird speaker pops when one region cuts into another region it's a really great way to have clean edits so in order to do this i'm going to go to wherever i had messed with my gain i'm going to click down to more and then i am going to go to fade out i'm going to change that from out to crossfade and then i'm just going to add in 10 milliseconds it really doesn't need to be much at all and i'm going to listen we're going to make sure that that's sounding okay you see how i could hardly hear that transition at all that's what a good crossfade will do so now that we've looked at this organ let's take a look at these vocals now most instruments if you're wanting to do any gate automation on them you know you're really only going to have to affect specific sections you know turn the verse up turn the bridge down something like that with vocals if you're okay with putting in a little extra work they can sometimes really benefit from you looking at individual phrases so making sure that each phrase is on average around the same loudness and this is because the vocals are so heavily scrutinized in the mix and they need to stay so far forward so having really good compression is an essential to getting a modern vocal sound so how exactly would i go about doing this luckily this is another thing where you can just use your eyes and then go back and double check with your ears now this is a rare moment where i'm going to tell people to use their eyes actively usually i'm pretty big at saying hey use your ears don't just trust your eyes but splitting these individual phrases up and then increasing their level like so so that they all kind of look like they're generally in the same area and then later on going and listening and making sure that's true is a completely fine way of making this work now you're probably going to be going back and changing up where the individual edits are because you might be cutting breaths in half and you definitely don't want to do that you might be having some strange popping noises going on you or you might be cutting off an s or the end of a word so uh again you're definitely gonna want to go and double check stuff but for now what i'm going to do let's just focus on this i'm going to grab this i'm going to definitely want to turn this up a little bit grab this turn it up a little bit um this may be down just a hair and yeah on the whole this is all looking quite a bit closer again we're just trying to make it closer to being in the same spot not necessarily exactly in the same spot i might actually take this down a little bit there we go and so now i would just grab all of these and i would add a crossfade so go over here i'd select crossfade and i'd add you know 10 milliseconds totally fine and then i would go and listen and i'd make sure that everything was still sounding pretty good see if i missed anything or if i was maybe a bit too aggressive i thought we'd take a stroll around the block but that wasn't fast enough and you said i can't get close to real emotion so this is a great moment where i'm really glad i went and checked it because even though this looked like it was the same size this is a much punchier vocal performance and so the individual words in between sort of these words that the singer is like spitting out are actually a lot quieter whereas these words are a lot more consistent so what i'm going to do is i'm actually just going to take this down a little bit so it's not quite so aggressive honestly a good rule of thumb you're kind of wanting everything to have around the same average level the peak level doesn't really matter so basically if you have a section like this one where you have occasional really loud peaks you can kind of ignore those and look more for the rest of the sound you know where's the rest of the sound living because a good compressor can handle those peaks but if everything else is super quiet well that's not really going to be very helpful to you so i might want to take this up quite a bit so that the average level is sitting where everything else is even though these peaks are a little bit too dramatic so now let's check this out around the block but that wasn't fast enough and you said i can't get close to real emotion and then at this point i might just take it down a bit and say we're good and call it a day this is supposed to be a pretty quick process it's something that you should definitely do before you start mixing but not necessarily something you need to spend hours doing if you can just get it in generally the right area you should be good to go now here's the big question that everyone asks me about gain automation won't this screw up my dynamics and you know it's true you might want a particular instrument to be quiet in the verse and loud in the chorus and gain automation gets rid of that kind of like our organ the verses for the organ maybe sounded better before i did this gain automation and now they're too loud but the great thing is that's what volume automation is for gain automation helps us to get a more consistent tone but volume automation helps us to get more consistent dynamics it helps our performance our overall sound to be better so if i maybe turned up my organ let's say by two dbs and now it's two dbs too loud in my verses well i can just open up my automation lanes and i can just grab this exact same area with my marquee tool and then turn it down by two dbs and now it's right back where it was before but with a much more consistent tone so honestly this is something that i will do on pretty much all of my mixes unless it's a mix where it's very stripped down and i'm wanting to keep it as close to the original performance as possible this is definitely a great secret trick that's going to help to get you much better sounding instruments so with that said that is how you do gain automation 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: 31,387

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

Id: aun6XN63Jvo

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 08 2021