Gain Staging Tutorial

[Music] hey friends of all the over-explained and misunderstood concepts in music production gain staging has to be the most ubiquitous everybody wants you to think that you're doing it wrong and that they alone are going to show you some magical key to a perfect mix instead of insulting your intelligence i'll just quickly explain what gain staging is then i'll show you a bunch of practical examples and tips you can use to get more of what you want out of your daw so this buzz phrase gain staging is simply feeding the right amount of signal into gain dependent or non-linear audio effects to get the sound that you want so what is a non-linear effect well it's an effect that sounds different depending upon how much signal is going into it for example distortion saturation compression limiting bit crushing amp simulators envelope followers and so on these are all non-linear effects these as opposed to linear effects which are chorus flangers phasers reverbs delays and so on let's check out what i mean okay so here we are in session view and the reason i'm doing that is because i've taken this little guy and i pulled this up so that we can look at the vu meters of each of the tracks this is the the level we can see right here now a lot of people get confused right off the bat this is not a gain control okay this is the output slider this is the last thing that affects the signal in the entire signal chain okay this is how loud the track's output will be okay this is an output control now if you look between each one of these processors we have my synth right here and then we have a bunch of different processors we have the auto filter utility so on you can see the gain between each one of these effects okay so take a look now check this out if i turn the slider all the way down you can still see the gains or the levels between each one of these effect processors right that's the first thing to understand this is an output control okay now the next thing to understand is that utility right here this device is the vehicle for gain adjustment in ableton live if the effect doesn't have its own input or output okay watch this i can turn this gain down right here and we can see there's signal here and signal here but there's no signal here i have to start turning it up so anywhere where you don't have gain control within a track you can simply slap a utility in there and there's nothing wrong with turning it up or down okay so i know these are some pretty boring concepts but that's just something to understand okay so linear versus non-linear effects chorus like most modulation effects are linear effects meaning it doesn't matter how much gain you push into them they won't change how they sound so the way i'm going to demonstrate this is i'm going to grab a second utility and put it after the chorus okay what i'm then going to do is group all of these together okay now they're all in a group i'm going to reveal the macros by clicking this little button and we're going to map the gain input and output gain so that when i turn this gain up this gain turns down the exact same amount all right so let's go ahead and map that mapping this first gain to this knob and i'm mapping the second gain of the second utility to this knob and i'm just going to invert them okay so that means that if i turn this any direction watch this the gain will go up in this one and the gain will go down in this one right so let's go ahead and listen to what happens when i do this [Music] we can hear that no matter what i do no matter where i put this it sounds exactly the same that's because the gain is changing linearly okay now let's go ahead and do this again but this time let's do it with a saturator okay so i'm going to cut this chorus out right and i'm going to put in a saturator now i'm going to turn the saturator on now listen to what happens as i change this gain i'll put it back at as close to zero as i can get it okay so starting from zero now take a listen to this at this moment we're on the analog clip saturation mode so take a listen and now we can clearly see that there's more breakup there's more harmonics in the signal but what we can also see is that as i'm increasing gain and compensating for that gain over here it's actually going down and level we can see the rms going down and level let's choose a different clipping algorithm let's choose medium curve i'll go back to the middle okay and let's do it again and so what we can clearly see is that saturator is a non-linear effect it sounds different and behaves different and outputs different levels depending upon how much gain is going into it okay now this is all very unnecessary what i have here okay i can go ahead and ungroup this all right i can remove these utilities from here at this moment because guess what saturator itself has a drive and an output now the thing to understand is that every single nonlinear effect has a different name for the same thing okay sometimes it's gain sometimes it's drive but at the end of the day this is an input level okay that's all that this is watch what happens as i turn this up so it's low right now this is representing the input signal thus far it's been pretty linear but once we start to get around this line right here it's going to start breaking up and it's going to become non-linear now you can hear that that's gotten pretty loud right i've put eight decibels of gain into the saturator that's why there's also an output control so i'm taking out for example eight decibels and now when i a b this we should relatively have about the same level and we do as you can see the peak level is a bit higher when the saturator is off but when the saturator is on the rms level is a little bit higher right take a look so that's the crucial thing to understand there are linear effects and non-linear effects now let's go ahead and take a look at a bunch of different examples where what you feed into non-linear effects as well as how you shape the signal vastly changes the result all right let's check it out so moving on to track two this is just a drum beat it's kind of a dirty drum beat check it out [Music] and here we have a saturator and as you can see our signal is going well up above the clipping line here and we're on the medium curve setting it's one of my favorite settings on saturator now i have a compressor before the saturator all right first thing to know is that this is not always what you want to do for some reason people think that there is a specific order to effects every single time and that is just not true okay again there is not a perfect recipe for anything in audio okay especially with non-linear effects in this specific case it makes sense to put a compressor before the saturator why because i need to shape the signal take a listen to what this saturator sounds like when the compressor is off we can hear that the kit kind of sounds scratchy it's just not that pleasing to listen to right with this is what what it sounds like without any of the effects kind of dry and boring right i needed to spice the signal up a bit and the saturator is doing a good job however it sounds scratchy when i turn it on [Music] but listen to what happens when i turn on the glue compressor okay listen to the difference i'll go ahead and a b it [Music] listen to how the compressor prepares the snare sound for going into the saturated listen to how different it sounds [Music] listen to how much more pleasing it is right that's because of the transient shaping that's happening with the compressor there's a little bit of attack letting a little bit of the initial snare splat through but it's instantly pushing the signal down and then bringing it back up over this release time so there is a nice shaping to the signal and that is a non-linearity okay depending upon how much gain is going into this compressor and then how much gain is coming out into the saturator we have better signal now here's another thing to look at if i were to turn this compressor on with the makeup gain turned down this is an output control okay if i was to do that what would happen is that the saturator would behave differently take a listen [Music] see i'm barely getting any breakup so i need to have makeup gain here to make up for how much gain is being reduced every single time i hit this threshold listen [Music] so you can see that even though the rms level is almost the same level with the makeup gain all the way down versus when it's up we're getting drastically different sounds hear how much more the saturator has to do with the signal when this makeup gain is up to where it was before [Music] that's such a crucial thing to understand okay so the next thing we're going to do i'm going to turn the saturator off and let's just listen to the compressor now this compressor is sitting on a bus of tracks right there are multiple tracks there's a kick drum a snare drum and so on right in this case the snare drum is doing what i like to call challenging this compressor the compressor the snare drum is so loud compared to the rest of the drums that the compressor has to work harder to take care of that snare drum okay so this is another thing to understand when it comes to gain staging i need to actually look at the snare drum and maybe turn the snare drum down a little bit check it out look how much more the needle is moving back whenever that snare drum hits so if i go in here and i bring the snare drum down a little bit take a listen so with this setting we're accomplishing more the kick drum now has punch as well as the snare drum and it all sounds a bit more balanced take a listen so when you have a compressor on a group of tracks like this it's very important to make sure they're balanced going into the compressor because it again is a non-linear effect and it relies so heavily on what you're feeding into it so i'll turn the saturator back on and i'll move on to the next track now in this case this is a baseline check it out [Music] now you might be looking at this and being like what on earth why would you scoop so much of this body out of the base well in this mix specifically in this mix what i wanted to do was get a little bit more of the clicky top end of this baseline right but looking at this you can see that i have an eq before this compressor okay and so again there is no magic order of effects there is never a magic order of effects this eq i might use an eq after a compressor or i might use it before in this case let's explore why i'm using this eq before this compressor okay i'm going to turn the eq off now look at how the compressor behaves when i do that [Music] we can see that we're getting gain reduction all the way up to negative 10 and that's not necessarily a bad thing if that's what i'm going for but with this eq on like this what's happening is that the base is getting clamped down on so hard by the compressor that i'm not enjoying it okay and so what i'm thinking about here is i want the top end of this base i want the clickety sounds right that's what i want in this mix so when i turn this eq on watch how much gain reduction we're getting [Music] so we can see that we're getting about negative 5 negative 5.5 at the very most in our gain reduction but the bass sounds more pleasing it sounds more balanced right [Music] so as you can see it's very important what you're feeding the compressor so maybe the perception up until this point is that these non-linear effects have perfect settings that there's some perfect threshold or input gain level on a compressor and that once you get it right you can save that preset and put it on any sound and get the same result but you can clearly see in here that that's not true how these effects sound can be completely different depending upon what you put into them so in reality getting good at gain staging means learning how these effects react to different types of signals that you feed into them right let's look at another example so this base move that i did might make a little bit more sense to you when you hear this other bass and this is kind of supporting the lowest octave of the song take a listen [Music] now let's go ahead and i'll add this lead as well and we'll listen to the whole track so this next example might be a bit more advanced but it's pretty simple once you understand what's going on right here i have a chorus going into an amp and now amp is an amp simulator so there's a lot of stuff going on under the hood this is basically a saturator circuit but you also have probably some compression in there some different styles of eq for the input and output stage so it's a non-linear effect okay now listen to this i'm going to go ahead and solo this this chorus also has a low cut the reason that they put this control in here is that so when you are putting a lot of course on stuff and you're using high wet amounts you're not putting the subs in the side channel okay this will focus the bass into the mids instead of on the sides okay so listen what happens though as i crank this control up [Music] wait a minute i thought chorus was a non-linear effect well it is what's happening is that we're changing the signal character going into the amp you can see that amp has a control here called dual mode okay when the output is in dual mode it basically is making two amps okay and it's processing the left and the right signal separately so when i change what is being fed into the mid or the side channel here you can hear that the amp is reacting so again back down low we get and as i crank it up listen [Music] now maybe that's more of what we're going for okay another thing i want to point your attention to is over here when you have a long list of non-linear effects here you can see all these effects i've got here we've got amp and glue compressor which are both non-linear effects when you have a whole stack of those in a row and most of the time when you're making bases especially if you're into edm or that whole thing you might have a long long long stack of these if you go back to the very beginning over here onto the the synth itself you'll hear that these non-linearities will have a much more drastic effect when you are starting to mess with the controls in the synth that's creating the original signal take a listen what happens when i change the filter frequency you can hear just how that tiny little move right there is very drastic on this whole thing right so real quick if you're enjoying the video you should check out my free webinar where i produce a track from start to finish in ableton the link is up here and in the description of the video i'm sure you'll learn a lot and you can also find out about my ableton online courses between all three of these there's 50 plus hours of hyper-focused ableton content which makes seed to stage to my knowledge the most robust ableton course available on the internet so go check out the link i'm sure you'll be happy that you did anyway let's get back to it all right so the last thing i want to look at is the master track okay so let's go ahead and grab a limiter and let's try to get this track loud so again with all of these non-linear effects the limiter is also a non-linear effect as you can see we have an input gain here and then the ceiling is the output gain basically no matter how much signal i feed into this limiter if it's doing its job it should only output at the very most negative point three decibels okay so what i'm going to do is i'm going to start cranking the the audio into this limiter we're going to crank it pretty hard because i want to show you something all right [Music] so you can see that we've got some significant distortion here okay there's some significant pumping and distortion in the signal let's go ahead and we'll set a release time maybe to get a little bit of a smoother result [Music] there we go so this sounds a little bit smoother but it's still got that pumping problem right there's a little bit less distortion when i turned off the auto mode and turned the release down a bit [Music] okay so how what do we do about this this is where you can use all the knowledge hopefully that you've gained up until this point to prepare this limiter for success okay you got to set it up for success right so now sometimes when you put a limiter on a track you can start to hear what is challenging the limiter what the what the track is that's making that limiter clamp down so hard on the signal and to me it's this kind of mid-range bass okay i can hear that it's pretty much the loudest sound other than the snare and kick in this mix right listen again [Music] right so what i can do is i can go in here and i can say all right i need to turn this compressor down a bit let's go ahead and do that [Music] okay so let's take a look at the limiter now that i've turned that down about 3 db [Music] okay we're getting somewhere we can see that the limiter is now pushing the signal down a little bit less and it sounds a little better now something else we can do is take a look at this low end bass now this low end bass is making a lot of deep subs right so what i can do is i can take a look at this and i can see that there's some challenging happening here so maybe one option i could do is i could turn down the subs of this low end base [Music] now listen to how much smoother that is just that small move there i still have relatively the same amount of what it sounds like low end but cutting out some of that flabby kind of difficulty here just feel kind of low end bass it sounds a little bit more tight right now let's take a look at the limiter [Music] now we can see that the limiter is so much less challenged than it was before but we need to do one more step i'm going to grab a glue compressor and put it before the limiter now this is yet another way that you can work on gain staging so how i want to set this glue compressor up is that i wanted to just catch those peaks okay the glue compressor is really great as you saw before at capturing very very sharp peaks okay so what we can do is i can turn the attack all the way down right i'll turn the release kind of down like this and what we're going to do is we're just going to dig into the the snare drum hits and anything that peaks out in volume okay now check this out as i turn this threshold down we're going to be able to clean up the sound of the limiter listen now i know that this is extreme and there's still a tiny bit of distortion in that limiter and it's still a bit of a pumpy mix but i have it a little bit higher than i normally would just to illustrate this but as you can see hopefully this is a mind-blowing moment for you you can see that the compressor is preparing the signal for the limiter and the limiter is doing a much better job of making that gain get loud okay but it's not pumping it doesn't sound as crappy as it did before right now normally i probably have the gain down a little bit more in this and i'd have a little bit less of an extreme compressor setting but yeah as you can see listen to the difference when i a b this [Music] so as you can clearly hear and see there's no one setting on any of these effects that will work every single time when it comes to non-linear effects this is why i roll my eyes every single time i see compressor or saturator presets it simply doesn't make any sense at all as each signal is unique since so much of how a non-linear effect behaves depends on the sound coming in there could never be a single preset that would ever make sense for these type of effects now i do understand presets for modulation effects as well as reverb and delays because for the most part these effects are linear effects right cool hopefully you're feeling a bit wiser today if you like this kind of thing make sure you subscribe and hit the little bell i'll see you next time everybody take it easy

Channel: Seed to Stage

Views: 13,090

Rating: 4.9665971 out of 5

Keywords: gain staging ableton, gain staging with vu meter, gain staging tutorial, gain staging, what is gain staging, gain staging explained

Id: jSuLo0TNbzE

Length: 21min 40sec (1300 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/MisplacedNote]

He is one of my favorites for production tuts

[u/erarya]

That was a great video - no nonsense, technical but accessible explanation of these audio engineering concepts.

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