How To Get Proper Gain Staging Levels Using Waves VU Meter

what's going on music creators it's your boy fly guy jay and i'm back with another video now on this episode of wavy wednesdays i'll be going over a basic mixing technique that's often overlooked but it's a critical first step in making sure you don't end up with a mix that clips distorts and sounds nasty this step is called gain staging and today i'll be showing you how you can use the waves vu meter to get your levels right on your two track instrumental before you record or before you start your mixing session if you're new to my channel or if you're interested in learning more about mixing and mastering or how to use certain plugins make sure you hit that subscribe button and click the bell so you can get notifications of future videos now without further ado let's get into it alright so like i just mentioned the first step towards a good mix is to make sure that your levels are correct coming in and then also maintaining that the levels are correct as you begin to mix record add different plug-ins add new vocals etc to your track you want to make sure you have proper gain staging so that you're giving yourself enough headroom during the recording and the mixing process to add new tracks or use plugins to modify your audio tracks in order to compress eq saturate raise the level etc without clipping which causes a nasty distortion and ultimately ruins your mix so in order to understand where our levels are there's two plugins i like to use for metering first being the waves vu meter which we'll go ahead and load now on our master channel multi-channel plug-in sound field vu meter the vu stands for volume units and it's basically a standard for measuring your input signal level by default it's calibrated to the analog sweet spot of negative 18 which you can see here which basically means that when this meter is hitting zero you're actually at negative 18 dbfs which is decibels full scale in simplest terms what that means is when this meter is hitting zero on your vu meter if you have it set to 18 then you'll actually be hitting negative 18 so somewhere around here on the meter that you see in your daw the second meter that i like to use is a peak meter let's go ahead and insert a peak meter in pro tools i usually go for the pa z meter now this is measuring the peak the highest points in your signal in the digital world we want to make sure that we're not peaking above zero so as long as we stay under a peak of zero dbfs then we won't get any clipping and we won't be introducing any nasty sounding distortion into our project so just to recap i like to use the vu meter to get kind of an average sound something that's more realistic to what the human hair ears and then i like to use a peak meter to see what the actual highest point our signal is hitting so now that i've explained these two meters let's go ahead and loop a section of the beat where the kick and base are and we'll take a look at what our meters are doing [Music] all right so you can see on our vu meter we want to be aiming towards zero which at times we're hitting but we're also pegging the meter out above three so we definitely want to reduce the gain of our beat our two track and on our peak meter we're maxing out at negative 0.5 this basically means we're not clipping we're not introducing any nasty audio distortions however once we start adding vocals to this beat once we start boosting uh our eq or compressing and making things louder we have a very limited ceiling to work with we only have 0.5 decibels of headroom to do anything to this track so here's a common mistake or misunderstanding that a lot of people have about gain staging a lot of people will simply take this fader and say okay i'm gonna lower this uh minus to minus six db and they'll say okay i just generated uh six db's you know of headroom but in reality that's not the case what you have to realize is that this fader is only accounting for the volume after any plugins that have been inserted here so it works from top down so you have to remember our incoming signal has only point five decibels of headroom so for example let's go and throw that peak meter onto the beat track we'll put one at the top of the chain and we'll put one at the bottom of the chain and let's say on this beat we wanted to do an eq eq boost so let's say we wanted to use a waves eq p1a i'll show you a quick example of how simply lowering the fader of the volume will not give you more headroom so we have our initial peak meter showing the incoming signal of our beat here then i have an eq which we will boost let's take 60 hertz and let's boost it i don't know five and then this meter here is our um peak metering after the eq so let's go ahead and play this back [Music] and there it is you can see in the actual plugin that we're clipping here the red light indicator is clipping in our eq plug-in this tells us that the sound coming out of our eq plug-in is already clipping it's already distorting our incoming signal was peaking at negative 0.6 but as soon as we boosted the eq on one plugin we're now clipping as you can see by this red indicator light and now the signal leaving our plug-in is clipping which you can see by the peak meter here we're now at three decibels above zero so now let's go back and i'll show you the correct way to do the gain staging alright so i'll pull up our vu meter again and i'll pull up our peak meter and in pro tools there's two quick ways that you can um reduce the gain of your track the first way is to simply click on this fader button here which is on the waveform click and drag it either down to decrease the gain or up to increase the gain i want to give myself at least negative six uh decibels of headroom to begin with so let's go ahead and drop this down to about negative six dbs now let's play back that same loop and see where we stand with our metering [Music] all right so now you can see we have much more head headroom to work with we're peaking at about negative 7.1 and on our vu meter we were hovering around two to three vu's and we were hitting zero once or twice during that loop so this is a great level to start with we can now go ahead and start recording vocals over this track or if you're mixing a track you can import the vocal stems and then start gain staging your individual vocal tracks now that we have that extra headroom created let's go ahead and throw that eq back on and then see where our metering is after the eq boost so we'll go back to that eqp1a we'll go to 60 hertz again we'll boost it five now let's play back that loop and see where we are with our metering so this is our meter before the eq this is our meter after the eq [Music] now you can see from our metering by doing that eq boost we went from a peak of negative seven dbs to a peak of about negative 3.6 dbs so now we're able to add that eq boost through our pultec eq without causing the clipping and the distortion the second important part about gain staging once you have the initial level set it's important to remember to always gain stage throughout your mix and what i mean by that is you can clearly see that we've gained about four dbs three and a half db's once our audio passed through this potec eq so you always want the volume going in to be relatively the same as the volume leaving your plug-in that way you're preserving that same amount of headroom throughout your mix and by the time you get done adding four five six however many plug-ins you're still going to have that headroom another important reason for keeping the volume going in equal to the volume going out i've said it in other tutorials but our ears trick us whenever you hear something louder you automatically assume that it sounds better in order to get a true understanding for what a specific plugin is actually doing to your audio you need to make sure the volume is the same going into it as it is coming out of it that way you can get a true representation for how the plug-in is changing your sound so on this particular plug-in we have a gain knob and we can compensate for the increase in gain by decreasing this gain knob so let's go ahead and do that [Music] without the plug-in with the plug-in so it's okay it doesn't have to be perfect you can see we're still about 0.2 decibels louder we were at negative 7.2 and now we're at negative seven and that's okay it doesn't have to be perfect you don't have to overkill and you know get ocd with it but at the end of the day you don't want to hear a drastic difference between the before and after the second way of increasing or decreasing the gain is instead of using the gain fader on the waveform you can insert a trim plug-in so let's say uh this plug-in didn't have a gain knob on it what we could do in order to maintain uh that gain before and after the plug-in is we could insert a trim plug-in after our eq plug-in and now we can change the gain of the audio signal by either decreasing or increasing the slider so let's say we didn't have this gain knob we'll change this back to uh zero and then we'll go to our trim plug-in and i'll decrease it by negative 3.4 here now we'll play it back [Music] and you could see we have that 0.2 decibel difference again so it's just another way to increase or decrease your gain in order to maintain your gain staging throughout your mixing process alright so once you have your beat gain stage properly the next step would be setting your gain staging on your preamp if you're using any analog hardware for recording your vocals for example i use the avalon m5 preamp uh when i'm tracking vocals you'll probably see a vu meter um somewhere on that preamp and one quick tip for you is if you are recording through one of these preamps you want to set the gain on your preamp so that you're always hovering around zero vu by doing that you'll have an incoming audio signal that's not too hot and not too low if it's too high then you risk the clipping and the audio distortion being introduced to your vocal and once that distortion is recorded in you can't really take it out if you have it too low then when you amplify that signal inside your daw you'll also be amplifying and boosting any of the unwanted artifacts that are introduced from the noise floor of your equipment like hissing or humming if you're not using any analog gear that has a vu meter on it i would suggest throwing a vu meter on the insert track of your audio track and when you're uh setting up your tracking for your vocals keep an eye on your vu meter and make sure when you're recording that incoming vocal you're hovering around zero it's okay if you go over a little bit it's okay if you're under at times you know you're gonna have a dynamic performance so if sometimes you're gonna be below sometimes you're gonna be above but you just wanna make sure one you're not clipping you're not uh peaking this you know red indicator light is not coming on to indicate that you're going over the signal and to the best that you can just try to hover around zero a lot of us modern music creators aren't really paying attention to that negative 18 db golden spot i'll give you two reasons why you still should aim for that negative 18 sweet spot one if you use any plugins that emulate analog equipment such as let's say a ssl eq or that pull tech eq i just had pulled up those plugins are designed to emulate the actual hardware in a sweet spot for those hardware units in order to get the best sound out of them you want to have the incoming signal coming in around vu or negative 18 dbfs in the digital realm can you send those signals into the plug-in hotter and still get you know a good sound that's not going to clip yes you can but if you want to get the best emulation of that plug-in why wouldn't you send it in at the recommended ideal input level reason number two is if your audio signal is going to be leaving your daw at any time to go to an analog equipment for example let's say you're sending your mix from your daw to a analog uh summing mixer the ideal level going into that mixer is going to be zero vu so long story short it's best practice to use a vu meter for your gain staging set it where zero vu equals negative 18 and you'll have plenty of headroom in your mix i hope you guys found this quick gain staging tutorial helpful and i hope you will implement these gain staging techniques into your recording sessions and your mixing sessions in order to improve the sound quality of your final mix if you enjoyed the tutorial make sure you click that thumbs up button drop a comment and let me know what your game stage and techniques are how much headroom do you like to have in your mix before you start tracking your vocals lastly if you haven't done so already make sure you hit that subscribe button and click that bell so you can get notifications of my next video for those of you who are interested in purchasing this waves vu meter i'll leave a link in the description if you are going to buy any of the plugins that you see in my tutorials do me a solid and make sure you click that link before you purchase it by doing so i'll receive a small commission at no extra charge to you but what it does is support my channel by allowing me to review more plugins and bring more tutorials to you guys until next time keep learning keep creating and keep grinding i'm out you

Channel: Fly Guy J Productions

Views: 44,813

Keywords: gain staging, waves vu meter, vu meter, waves vu meter tutorial, tutorial, waves vu meter demo, how to gain stage, how to gain stage in pro tools, trim plugin, clip gain, proper gain staging, what is gain staging, headroom, gain staging with a vu meter, how to set recording levels, headroom 101, gain staging 101, why gain stage, how to do gain staging, gain staging mistakes, gain staging tutorial, setting preamp gain, wavy wednesday, gain, staging, stage, waves vu meter plugin

Id: 45kf8pDn8Ng

Length: 17min 23sec (1043 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020