Live Sound - Gain Structure | Ryan Dowdall | Digico S31 | Waves Soundgrid | Worship Broadcast Mix

game structure buzzword buzzword everyone will click this one [Music] all right so in this video we're going to talk about gain structure gain structure is one of the things i see the most misinformation about as well as the most confusion about so i want to make it very very simple there's a lot of technical explanations of gain structure but i don't hear people talk about gain structure in terms of musicality and how that actually relates to mixing very often so i wanted to kind of break that down for you guys and by the time this video is over you will know it in and out and know exactly how to implement proper gain structure for this type of a mix in your church or venue so gain structure is the level at which the audio signal enters the console and we accomplish this through microphone preamps uh that microphones plug into that you gain up that separate kind of the the microphone from the noise floor and amplify that so that it's a nice healthy clear signal and di boxes like on a keyboard or a base uh that takes something uh down to uh from line level to mic level so that you can work with it inside of your console and it's not clipping right up against the uh the top of your preamp in the days of analog you had a meter that went to zero in the middle and then usually the plus 12 or plus 24 plus whatever that console was capable of outputting and you wanted to aim for the level of your signal to be at zero that was called nominal and that's where manufacturers designed their equipment to work at so everything worked properly the way the manufacturer intended when things were at that zero level now in the digital world the meters go to zero from negative infinity and zero is clipping so if you hit zero you're clipping and that's that red light and that nasty sound that nobody likes to hear now minus 18 db full scale which is the meter that is used for digital consoles and digital audio is the corresponding value of 0 db vu which is the way that analog meters worked so -18 is the digital equivalent of nominal that being said you don't want all your meters to meter nominal now that might sound crazy but different sources react differently to a microphone preamp so vocals are very very very dynamic drums are incredibly transient there's a very fast high peak when the stick hits a drum and so the musical listening level of audio the the rms the average level of that signal needs to be as close to nominal as we can get so sometimes that's going to mean the meters might look like they're peaking hotter than they're supposed to but the average level of the signal is metering in a way that it's hovering around that nominal point and it becomes much easier to mix your plugins will work the way you expect them to you can set things around zero which is that nominal level equivalent and it will start responding at that level so let's take an example let's do just the drums on this console in this session i'll pull them up and here is an example of how we would gain stage drums that would look like everything metering about minus five to minus ten minus ten would be the average and minus five would be like if he's really slamming the snare it might hit up there that's going to let that nominal average rms level well that's going to let the average rms level be at nominal which is that -18 middle of the meter level that you want your signals going into so if i open up this kick drum for example we pull open this uh ssl e channel which is what i use for almost every channel as my channel strip i love this because it has a great meter on it that is a very musical meter so it doesn't show me necessarily to the peak value what i'm doing it just shows me the rms level and so i aim for my rms level on this ssl to hit this first yellow light which is 10. what that means is because the drums are super transient it means that the actual average musical level of the signal is closer to this minus 20 which is that the the 20 led on the ssl is kind of the equivalent musical equivalent to minus 18. you can see it it goes in increments of 5. so 10 15 20 25 30. so 20 is the one that's closest to the nominal level i'm looking for the average level of my signal to be because drums are so transient they're going to meter higher and at a peak level so knowing whether you're working with peak metering or rms metering is incredibly important because it will make or break your entire file if you set it incorrectly so electric guitars are super compressed so you usually can set them to this 20 led or minus 18 because that's nominal keyboards are the same way acoustic guitars can be really dynamic so you might want to meter them up a little hotter because the average level of the quiet notes still needs to be nominal and that's where you use things like compression when it gets spiky to push it back down so i'm going to play some audio and this is a session that is gain stage the way i would gain stage on a sunday morning or at a show or even when i'm making a record just to make sure that all my gates and everything are responding correctly you can see on this kick drum the compressor threshold is at zero the gate threshold is at negative one and that's kind of where this analog unit was designed to work its best at so i'll play some audio and you can hear everything sounds nice and punchy and the kick drum is metering that minus 10. some of them are a little lower and if you really start smacking it it might hit five you see my compressor is every now and then lighting up it's not doing a ton of compression you saw it hit five there and if we go to the overview you'll notice all of my drums my close mics i should say that are picking up that initial stick transient are metering that way so my snare drum is metering the exact same way you'll notice my gait settings are almost the exact same now this drum is a lot uh a lot more dynamic so he's really hitting it hard and it's hitting five a lot more but the average level of his normal hits is this 10. and that's okay if it goes up a little bit as long as we don't actually hit zero on our drums because that's clipping so now i'll show you an example of what setting the meters to all look the same across your entire mix will sound like when you pull all your faders up to about the same level you can see on the the console everything's metering halfway and if we go to this soundgrid page everything is halfway up so it looks like i set my gains to minus 18. it's right by this uh let's make the meter bigger right above this 20 which is that minus 18 and you can see i'm peaking at that level on the ssl average meter so this is how a lot of people would think that is the right way to set gains but for a drum it's not so if we set everything to this level and we start pulling in our other instruments [Applause] [Music] everything is super weird sounding and all of the high frequency information is super loud and all of the transient information i can barely hear so those drums don't sound like they're in the mix at all so if we gain stage things correctly we'll be able to see all of our meters metering an average level of minus 18. so that's going to look different depending on the the source and so this is where as audio engineers we need to know what kind of source are we mixing if i'm mixing something super transient like drums percussion um you know if you've got someone playing congas or something they're very transient sources they're transient just means they're spiky they're not sustained sources so we want the sustained average level to be minus 18. so for drums that looks like this here's our kick drum metering at about -10 snare drum averaging -10 our snare 2 mic averaging about -10 you know some of the higher hits are going to go higher it's audio it's dynamic and that's what compressors are for we have a sample track in here in case we do like sample replacement but we're not doing anything like that right now for the toms [Music] tom one metered at minus ten he hit tom two pretty hard so that metered a little higher for that hit so there that tom hit metered minus ten our overheads because our overheads aren't close mics and they're up above the drum kit capturing the whole drum set if we get them in phase and they're positioned correctly and they're decent mics you won't have to gain them up to -10. because they're not super transient they're distant mics so we want the average level because it's in average sounding source it's not a close mic source to be about that minus 20 halfway up the meter so our overheads you can see i use the snare to set the gain level because the snare is usually the loudest the snare on his loud hits is hitting about halfway up the meter that lets you blend in the overheads you can see i have them about you know minus minus eight or so while the rest of the drums are at unity that lets you blend it in nicely and still have some decent resolution on your fader bass is a different story depends how you process your bass here at the power place we use a lot of distortion on bass because distortion makes you hear harmonics of the sound higher up so on something like a bass where it's a really low fundamental note say the the note's fundamental frequency is 80 hertz that's a super low note that only subwoofers really produce you're not going to hear that on a tv you're not going to hear that on a phone or something like that so if you distort it it might sound a little bad even it might sound a little crazy by itself but the harmonics when you put the whole mix in and you play it on a smaller speaker are going to let you actually perceive the notes that the bass is playing which lets you hear the bass and even in the room it helps it sit nicely inside of everything and it lets the guitars go up a little higher and everything to continue to stay full without you having to use your subwoofers to make your bass heard because if you use your subwoofers to get your low end and not your mix to make things balanced and tight and punchy across the whole frequency spectrum your mix isn't going to sound good outside of your room so here's what the bass would sound like and how the bass would meter on the gain staging of our ssl which i use the preamp on the digicode to set this the meters on this console are a little hard to read so i like to use the ssl plug-in meters so this is our base before he's hit his distortion pedal it's averaging about that minus 15 minus 10 and there's our distortion i run my base a little bit hotter than nominal because i want it to respond with my compressors a little quicker you can see when he peaks it peaks that first yellow light you can see my compressor this la2a is just barely moving at that level and you can see how compressed this source is it's barely moving the meter and that might sound really bad to you but in context [Music] it just sounds like audible bass so that's how we use some bass distortion to compress our base at the source and send it to us and how we would gain stage base for guitars and keys i would run those nominal which is what we want they're also a compressed source so i run the drums hot because i want that average level to be nominal i run the bass a little hot because i want that average level to be a little bit above nominal so that my compressors kind of push back as the original units were designed to work at and it lets me run my fader at a good resolution that way so i'm not turning up the bass i'm just fading it into the mix the way that feels right to me and then for electric guitar you'll notice it's metering at -20. that's what it sounds like [Music] so that's nominal our acoustic is almost the exact same thing but this is a transient source as well because you've got these strums [Music] so it's averaging that minus 20 and every now and then it'll go a little bit above if he gets really big and into it let me see if i can find a section where he's really hitting it hard [Music] yeah there you see it so every now and then if he digs in it's going to jump up a little bit again that's what compressors are for they help push the dynamics back in a live setting to help even the volume so acoustics electrics i run it nominal piano is the same thing you want that to meter at nominal but piano will spike because you know if you're if your keys player is playing super soft you want those dynamics to come through because they're really beautiful and they they can help carry the moment in a service um in a way that almost no other instrument can but when they're really big and they slam their keys you want your compressors to react and keep that down but you will see that level increase so when she or he really hits the piano you'll see it jump up above nominal but you'll see on this example how that average level is fluctuating but staying where it's supposed to so it's right now she's kind of playing soft and it's hitting that nominal we all hit bad notes sometimes so this one is actually staying at nominal for most of the most of the time there you go so this keys is going up every so often just like the acoustics are you'll notice the pattern it goes above every now and then if it starts to get a little bit more dynamic and then for vocals i actually use uh this plug-in here called arvox i like the way this compresses um and so you'll see as we set the gain for a vocal i don't want the vocal mics to ever clip because that is an awful sound and they're the most important thing in your mix so i will actually set my input gains a little lower on my vocals because some of our singers can give you you know especially in like contemporary worship where there's a lot of um belting in the big sections and very quiet singing when it's kind of empty the dynamic range of a vocal especially in modern worship can be all over the place so i want to make sure that at its peak level of singing they will never clip so i run those a little lower they might come in at minus minus 30 or minus 20 on their normal peaks so their average might be a little lower but then i actually use the makeup gain on my vocal buss compressor to get that level of all the vocals up because it has a unique feature where it won't let things clip it's got a clipper on it which is a nice soft way of limiting the vocals if they do get that loud so i'll show you that when we get there but i use my compressor i don't like doing more than 6 db of compression on a lead vocal so i will set my input gain this compressor never really changes and i set my input gain until i see the right amount of compression and i know then that it follows so this was kind of what that would sound like [Music] so if my gain was too hot you would see uh this going on and you can see on this on the left and right here the input and output meters his peaks are up here at minus 15 but that average is hanging out a little bit lower than nominal desire you see there's a lot of dynamic range so if i were to have this too low holy spirit fire your own desire holy spirit here his loud notes kind of go away from us dynamically and his quiet notes almost get gated if there was too much [Music] [Applause] the compressor starts reacting in a way that is kind of very unpleasant to the ear it's pushing down the high notes um and we're approaching clipping on our gain and we do we want to avoid that because if he goes for a note it's going to clip and it's just going to sound like junk everywhere live stream pa in-ears and everybody's gonna be really sad and we don't want people to be sad we want them to enjoy good sound so that's the vocals and vocal gain structure as well as all the other instruments and kind of how to to set your gain structure at your console so the main takeaway is you want the average level of your signal to be at nominal if it peaks a little bit higher that's okay that's what compression is for and if it's going to have a lot of dynamic range you might actually shoot a little bit lower like on a vocal for example then like we saw on drums because they're so transient all those close mics they actually need to meter a lot higher because that initial stick hit is this spike of level but the actual sound of the drum that follows is a lot lower so we want to have a balanced sound that way so that's the basics of gain structure for any other sources like crowd mics speaking mics playback talkback mics click tracks synth paths backing tracks whatever the source shaker tambourine cello cajon um if you have the output of a nintendo playing mario kart on your front of house console for some reason nominal minus 18 on the ssl channel ship that's that green light that says 20 on most consoles it's about 55 60 of the way up the meter but look at your console's manual uh look at the the specs of your console to find out what the nominal led metering is on that and shoot for the average level of that you

Channel: The Power Place Production

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Length: 22min 56sec (1376 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 24 2021