Gain staging in mastering (the right way)

so let's talk about gain staging in mastering this is something that is important to understand both for the sake of making your mastering chain sound as good as possible but more importantly so that you use a workflow that helps you make the right decisions and this is actually not very complicated at all I will get to that a bit later in this video but first we need to discuss a misconception about gain staging that is floating around on the internet and that has to do with loudness and gain staging and it goes a bit something like this instead of getting all the loudness in one big step at the end of the chain you should add a little bit of gain in several steps throughout the processing chain This Way the final limiter won't have to work as hard or something like that and everything will sound amazing and yes there are occasions where you would end up with a gain structure like this and we will get to that as well but in general I think that this is a terrible way of working especially for beginners because it will stop you from making the best decisions while also tricking you into believing that you are in fact making great decisions it can be really confusing trust me I have been there so let's sort this out my name is Thomas and I have been mastering records professionally for more than 20 years I run this channel together with Sophia and we also have a mastering company together and on this channel we talk about audio mastering foreign okay so here we have a mix and I want to master this in fact I have already done that I have added some effects so I have an effect chain here so let's have a listen to this [Music] foreign okay I think it's an improvement over the mix and I have intentionally done this small string by using this technique of adding gain at every step of the way and let's have a look at each of these steps first we have The Equalizer this is doing some boosting in the mids and in the highs let's have a listen to this and I will use the bypass to disable this so you can hear what's what is happening in this plugin foreign [Music] it's a bit more open so that's nice then we have the next plugin which is a dynamic equalizer and this is compressing the low end a bit and I have also compensated this with a bit of gain at the output [Music] foreign thing here not a big change but we're keeping the low end a bit more in control so let's move to the next one this is a compressor this plugin has several stages but we are only using the compressor in this one [Music] okay so now we are getting somewhere with this plugin we get a big audible Improvement of the sound everything gets closer it's more up front and it sounds overall more exciting so that's good right let's move on to the next one this is a saturator so let's hear what this one is doing [Music] foreign thing here we get a big Improvement of the sound right so this makes everything sound better as well we get a bit more excitement in this one then we have the next one this is a clipper so let's listen to that one [Music] okay same thing here it's a bit more subtle but it's an audible improvement over the mix to my ears and finally we have the limiter let's listen to this foreign [Music] okay it's a bit more subtle but we can hear that it's it's not degrading the sound at least it makes things sound better while also Peak limiting the mix to get this final loudness and we can see that it's only working up to about 2 DBS so it's not much gain reduction that is needed in this last step of the chain we can see that we are reaching about -10 left so it's it's not a very loud monster in the end but it's it's a moderately loud monster and we only needed to use about one and a half DB of gain reduction in the last step so the limiter really doesn't work that hard so this really seemed like a good method to work at least on paper but as I said in the beginning of this video I don't think this is a very good way of doing mastering and there are mainly two reasons for that and the first reason is that in this way of working makes the bypass buttons useless and that is because there is a loudness difference between before and after so when you enable the plugin then there is a increase in loudness and we humans tend to prefer when things sound louder we have a video about loudness bias if you want to dive deeper into this subject so in this case it would be very difficult to evaluate whether this plugin actually makes the mix sound better because it's also making the mix sound louder and the other reason as to why I think this method is not very good is that it messes with the gain structure in the mastering chain because if I would for example remove this compressor plugin then that would affect all the plugins coming after this compressor because there would be less signal going into the saturator so this would be less pushed into saturation and it would be less signal going into the Clipper so this would clip less of the signal and there would also be a lower level going into the limiter and the final output level would also be lower so somehow if we want to remove this compressor then we would also need to compensate for the level loss that this brings so disabling a plugin in a chain like this is not as easy as pressing the bypass button because we will need to do more things later in the chain to compensate for the missing plugin but chances are that if you are using this method for mastering then the plugin will stay on because the plugin is adding loudness then you will also get a bit of dopamine hit each time you enable the plugin because it will instantly make everything sound better and it feels like you're making progress and that things are going in the right direction it could also be the case that it's not making the mix sound better only louder it's actually much more difficult to make things sound better but it's very easy to make things sound worse but louder so let's have a look at another way to do this instead I think this is a much better workflow for mastering so I have prepared another mix here so we will have a look at that one instead it's the same mix and it's basically the same processing we can have a listen it sounds pretty much the same [Music] it's pretty much the same processing but with a completely different approach to gain staging now the first thing that happens in this chain is that there is an equalizer there is no Equalization going on I'm only using this for adjusting the level of the signal so the first thing that I'm doing in this chain is that I'm reducing the level with 1.5 DB and that might seem like a random number but it's not actually if we take this mix and analyze the loudness of it then we can see that the integrated loudness of this mix is minus 16.4 lufts and it's usually good to set a baseline level through the the mastering chain so that you always enter the chain at approximately the same level every time and many plugins especially if you have analog modeled plugins they tend to sound the best when you hit them with a level of approximately minus 18 lufts so by reducing the level of the input with 1.5 DB then I will reach approximately minus 18 lufts at the beginning of the chain so the next plugin in the chain is The Equalizer and this still have the same setting as before the only difference now is that I reduced the gain with 0.5 DBS and this makes the overall loudness of the EQ sound approximately the same so that we can use the bypass button without having this loudness change [Music] the next plugin is the the dynamic EQ and in this case I have just removed the output gain because this processing will not do that much for the the loudness of of the signal let's have a listen oh the overall loudness stays pretty much the same even when we are reducing the low end a bit and whenever I'm in doubt I will tend to give the loudness advantage to the bypassed version so if the processed version still sounds better although the bypassed version is a tiny bit louder then I know that I have made the right choice and this becomes more obvious if we listen to the the next plugin the compressor [Music] foreign [Music] and as you can hear now it becomes much more difficult to hear what the plugin is actually doing you really need to focus your ears more to hear what's actually going on here and that is a good thing and hopefully you are beginning to see the pattern here I have tweaked the settings of each of these plugins so that they have Unity gain when the signal passes through and in this context I'm using the word Unity gain to mean that there is no change in the perceived loudness when I enable and disable the plugin and the same thing goes with this saturator this has also been compensated at the output so that we get the same loudness before and after foreign [Music] so once again no drastic difference I have tweaked the settings so that we get the same amount of saturation that we got in the first version but now I have also removed the loudness from the equation and in this case the way I do this is I use the output gain of the plugin to reduce the level coming out from the plugin because this output control is just a straight linear gain there's nothing magical happening with this output gain it's just a gain after the plugin in most of these plugins all the saturation and Mojo and everything the analog things that you want from the plugin is happening before the output gain I'm not aware of any plugin that is doing any additional saturation or or other cool things at the the output stage so let's look at the next plugin the Clipper plugin and this is a different setting from the other version because in that I was using the gain let's have a look at how that looked in the last version I was using the gain control to push 1db into the clipping threshold which which is at 0 DB Fs in this case and this caused some clipping in the signal of of that version now the main difference in the new version here is that and we are entering this plugin at a much lower level because we have kept Unity gain through all the previous plugins in the chain so now we enter this plugin at a much lower level and I also want to keep the output level of this plugin at Unity gain and the simplest way to do this is to not use the game control either at the input or the output but only use the clip control and what this does is that it moves the clipping threshold of this plugin and I have put this at -8 DB and this will make this plugin do as much clipping on the signal as the previous plugin did but the main benefit now is that I have Unity gain through this plugin so I can easily disable or enable this plugin and listen for what it does without having any loudness bias involved and without risking to mess up the gain structure for the rest of the chain and so far we have kept Unity gain through all of the plugins in the chain but the exception now is the final limiter here we actually have all the game that we need in order to make the monster as loud as we want it to be at the end of the chain so here we have the the final jump in level and now you might think well doesn't this mean that the limiter also will be working way too much because we do all of this level gain at one stage in the monster machine but that isn't really the case because we can still have things earlier in the chain that will shave off some peaks of the signal before entering the peak limiter and I would say that in this case maybe the compressor is reducing some of the Peaks the saturator might very well do some reduction of the Peaks as well but the main reduction of the Peaks comes from this Clipper so if I hit play then we can see that the gain reduction of the pigment meter is still below 2 DBS and that is exactly as it was in the previous version as well so basically we have achieved the same result as we did in the first version but without having this incremental gain change for each step of the way so now we can have a look at some of the benefits of doing it in this way if I for example take this this version and I will copy it over here so that we have a new clean version to work with now we can see that since each of these plugins have been loudness matched they are unity gain then it's very easy to to enable them or disable them as we want and really make sure that each of them is actually doing a good job and I think that the equalizer is doing a good job it's a bit bass heavy in the mix and this is a way to remedy that I might have chosen to reduce the low end instead but it works quite well to to push other parts of the frequency spectrum as well it's a Jin and yang this is pretty much the same as lowering the base so I think this can stay but the next one I'm not too sure about [Music] I think maybe we can try to leave it off for now uh the compressor I think it's compressing a bit too much and one way to fix this is to use the mix button to just blend the clean and the compressed signal so I think something like this [Music] foreign [Music] that's a better amount of gain reduction I think and as you can hear you really need to focus your listening more now to hear the actual differences because we have removed the loudness from the equation so it takes a bit more effort to actually tweak the the plugins now but I think the reward is much bigger because now we are doing actual progress with each of these plugins I do feel that the monster that we have is a bit crunchy and I believe that it comes from this one [Music] and this plugin has a very nice feature for adjusting the amount of crunch without having to tweak the individual settings and it's that is to use this density parameter here and what the density does is that if you increase it then it will increase the input level while also reducing the output level with the same amount so by reducing this density then we can also reduce the input level to the saturator while also increasing the output level so by tweaking this then we can decide how much of this saturation do we want how much should we push this foreign [Music] and I needed to tweak the output level a bit now to compensate for the the reduced amount of saturation because the saturation in itself will make the signal sound a bit louder as well so now we get a little bit of excitement from the saturation but not so much saturation that it gets crunchy and I think I like this better as for the next plugin the Clipper I'm not sure that this should be I'm not a big fan of using hard clipping on a mix you can see how it sounds with and without [Music] foreign [Music] the kick drum does get a bit crunchier and we get a bit more clarity on the kick drum especially but I don't think I want that much crunch so I will increase the threshold of this so that I get less clipping [Music] and that's a bit better I think just enough clipping so that we get a bit of crunch on the kick drums I could also leave this off I'm not really sure but let's keep it enabled and now we can see that the final limiter is working a bit more than it was before but I think that sounds good so I hope you can see now that this way of working makes it much easier to actually decide what each of these processes should do because I believe that every processor that you add to the monstering chain should have a purpose there should be something that you want each of the plugins to do otherwise just remove it so when would it be a good thing to use the method that we used in the first version that is to increase the gain at each step of the chain well I would say that if you're monstering in the box then there is really no reason to use that method at all because each plugin usually have an output level that you can use to compensate for any changes in gain that has happened within the plugin that's the main purpose of the output level as I see it but if you are using analog equipment then there might be a different situation because in the analog world then we have more parameters to consider we have a noise floor we have clipping points of each processor and we have the clipping points of the da converter and the ad converter so gain staging becomes a bit more critical there so in a professional analog mastering setup then you might find these kinds of things that the gain structure is not based around Unity gain through each processor but it's rather based on operating each piece of equipment at the optimal level but gain staging in the analog domain and interfacing analog and digital that's a big subject and we won't go any deeper into that in this video just be aware that the problems with increasing gain in each step is the same in the analog domain as it is in the in the digital domain it will still need to be aware of the loudness bias and counteract that in some way when you are assessing the sound so to summarize what we have said in this video the method that I prefer to use when I'm working is to find an optimal level that you want your mastering chain to work in in this case I have chosen -18 loves it's just approximate you can choose whatever you want but plugins tend to work best at that level so use a plugin at the at the beginning of the chain just to set the level in this case I have used a an equalizer with all the bands off but there are other ways to do this you will probably find something in your door that can change the gain without doing anything else and then keep all the plugins in the chain at Unity gain so when you press the bypass button then there will be no shifts in the perceived loudness that will make it much easier to decide if the plugin is actually doing anything good and it will also make it easier to disable a plugin that isn't doing its job properly you can switch plugins in and out easily without messing up the gain structure and then you do the final Peak limiting in one big step in this case I have increased 10 DBS with a ceiling of 1 DB so we have 9 DBS of gain at the end of the chain the numbers doesn't really matter it kind of depends on what level you want to end up with with in the end but you can still use other limiters or as in this case a Clipper earlier in the chain to reduce the Peaks so that the final limiter doesn't have to work as hard so you can still stack limiters on top of each other just make sure that you have Unity gain through each of the limiters and then you can sort of reduce the Peaks before entering the final limiter where you have the actual gain to reach the final loudness level and if you want some more tips on how to use plugins for mastering I suggest that you get our free pdf five mastering strategies using free plugins there you will get some great strategies that I use all the time when I'm mastering as well as some tips on free plugins that you really should get if you don't have them already you will find the link in the description so I hope you enjoyed this video and that you got something out of it if you did please hit the like button that really helps us and also consider subscribing to the channel and hitting that Bell notification and of course feel free to leave a comment as well we try to read and answer as much as we can so thank you so much for watching and I will see you next time

Channel: Mastering Explained

Views: 54,878

Keywords: Mastering, Mastering Explained, Audio, Music Production, CD Mastering, Audio Mastering, EQ, Tutorial, Mastering tutorial, How to, mastering techniques, mastering plugin chain, gain staging, unity gain, equal loudness, loudness matching, gain staging tutorial, gain staging explained

Id: JtxholnaqXk

Length: 25min 17sec (1517 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 25 2022