The No.1 trick for LOUD mixes - Gain-Stage like a PRO in Cubase #cubase #mixing #gainstaging

hello everyone and welcome back on this video we're going to talk about a subject that can make or break your mix it can make your master sound louder or quieter it can make your final results sound more professional and that's gain staging such an important thing and something that many people neglect and many people don't take care of in my opinion cubase is the king of game staging when it comes to daws and on this video i'm not only gonna show you why but i'm going to show you all the ways that you can gain stage inside cubase because you might just have missed some of them if there is one dw that makes gain staging a breeze and a pleasure that's cubase and i'm going to show you why today on this video so gain staging what is gain staging basically gain staging is one of these things that you need to get right from the very beginning when you start producing a track or recording a track and especially when you're mixing a track so that you can get to the next stage when it comes to mixing when it comes to mastering if you gain stage right at the very beginning then you're going to mix better you're going to master better everything is going to sound cleaner so when i'm talking about gain staging it's all about making sure that you have enough headroom on your master bus that you have enough headroom for your plugins you have enough headroom for your processing let's say i have these drums okay and let's duplicate them a few times like this that's fine that's enough for me but let's play them and let's see what happens let's go to a meter here that i always want to keep open and let's see how it looks [Music] check what happens here right i just dropped this loop from media bay [Music] it's it's almost peaking at zero right now this on its own it's not a problem but in the context of a mix this will break your mix in the end right now if i start producing a track and many people start like that they just drop a loop and they start adding things on top of it if i start working like this let's say i want to add a sub bass or something like this already i'm going to clip my master buss right i'm going to go over zero even if i add this vocal you will see that i'm going to clip let's let's let's play just for the fun of it okay we clipped with just one vocal not even a sub sub would have so much more energy okay so i mean we know that for digital audio we shouldn't go over zero so what you would normally do you know what most people do and i see many people doing this uh in other dws as well what they do the the instinct is to go to your mixer okay here and basically they drop the their faders like this they just lower the faders by the way i've said this many times i always like to keep a headroom of -12 on my master bus while i'm still producing and mixing and this will give you great results when you're mastering later on okay most of the times this works don't take it as a rule or anything but for me it works like 99 of the time it looks like we solved the problem now this is all good and if you have nothing else to work with that might be your only solution this is not really a solution and i'm gonna tell you why basically when you produce and you're working with loops you're working with the virtual instruments you know most of the times all these loops all those virtual instruments are going to be very close to zero they're going to be very loud why because guess why like music if you're a sound designer okay i've done quite a bit of sound design work and i know that i cannot afford my sounds to be quiet okay if i make a loop sample pack and my loops are quiet and they're already gain stage nobody is going to like them because immediately they think it's quiet it's not good it's just like music okay that's why we had the loudness worse that's why people still want loud mixes the same goes with presets on software synthesizers if you get something like omnisphere for example and you just load a preset it sounds incredible but it sounds loud it sometimes it clips the stereo bus straight away straight away so i mean if you're working with instruments you can turn down the output of the instrument that's the best way to do it but what happens with loops what happens with you know instruments that you have no control over an output it's just audio this might solve the problem like we said but not really why because when you've done this immediately you've sacrificed a lot of flexibility when it comes to digital mixing let me explain check out the faders here right and see what happens see here we have zero this is unity gain for this fader now check how much space i have to move between zero and let's say minus five okay there's a lot of room and actually i can use my fader to show you see a lot of room now if you pull down your fader like this so from here to here it's 5 dbs but from here to here it's 10 dbs and from here to here it's 10 db's you see where i'm going the resolution decreases the more you lower the fader so what does that mean in practical terms let's say you want to automate this vocal later on first of all when you lower the fader you've already lost this thing now you need to automate the fader it's still here you have less control right it's much better if you automate the fader starting from here and move like that rather than starting from here and go like okay now that's 10 db it's too much too much too much you know you lose resolution here for most digital mixers the next thing that people do when they work in a dw is they grab their events you know their audio event and they use clip gain okay in cubase you can of course do this you can cut and and do it again and so on and so forth this is a better solution if you ask me the problem with the solution is that when you do this you're altering the audio okay you're actually even if it's not destructive you're changing this first of all i don't like doing this because then what happens is you know sometimes you have to go like this and then you can't see the waveforms anymore and you have to zoom in and then some other waveforms are huge and these are really small you know what i'm talking about and while i was working in studios i had to work with dws where i had to do this this was the main practice right i wasn't very happy right so what's the best way you know what what if it's not that and if it's not anything else then what's the best way let me show you how you can gain stage in cubase and you will be so much happier if you know all these different gain stages in cubase the first gain stage option is on your mixer you know you can use it here on the pre-section or on your channel settings and look what happens i just leave my fader at unity gain i leave my waveform alone another reason why i want to leave my waveform alone because my client might say you know what i'm going to send your replacement vocal now i have to figure out what gain staging i had there and change it you know or you know they say i'm going to send you a different version of this road part and then i have to redo everything clip by clip you know event by event not fun not fun instead if you work like this and you open your mixer and you go to your pre-gain or here pre-gain check what happens to this drum loop okay 12. i hit -12 is my fader intact check is my waveform intact check no problem that's the first gain staging stage right our pre-gain like in real consoles they knew what they were doing the daw should be able to do this for you what's the next game stage the next game stage is very interesting and i think that many people forget it exists and this is a lifesaver when it comes to vocals and i'm going to explain the next gain stage is dynamic we can actually morph it with the waveform and it will follow the waveform let me explain this is actually one of the things that i always do in cubase this is one of my tricks when i want to get really nice vocals that sit right in the mix without over compressing them and without you know adding so much compression that it's unnatural and i start to get artifacts maybe i'm gonna do a more detailed video about this let me know in the comments down below if you'd like to see that but in a nutshell you just grab your pencil tool okay and let's see see now we know that this part of the vocal is loud okay most people in you know if you're using another dw you already have to automate i'm not even close to automating yet automation is for making your mix dynamic fixing problems all these things but it's the very very last stage after your plugins after everything else we need to fix issues or tame vocals before we even get to this stage right if i leave this like it is right now it's going to drive into my compressor into my eq and this bump here is going to make my compressor work harder why you don't want that right so here's what you do you just grab your pencil tool and check how easily and how naturally you can make this vocal a little bit more smooth check it out check it out see that did you know about this let me know in the comments down below this is the secret trick for vocals right don't overdo it but trust me this will sound way more natural than any compression okay and we it's we want compression we want to use compression because they it can give us a character but don't use a compressor to fix problems that you can do like this okay i'm going to go a little bit just just just make tame it a little bit let go okay and then you can actually i overdid it here but you can actually do it exactly like you want to let go see how this sounds now it doesn't peak so much check it out [Music] okay let's undo everything let go see it reaches almost -10 let go and then with all the editing [Music] but it doesn't sound compressed it doesn't sound muffled it doesn't sound like it cannot breathe and i'm doing it very quickly now but i would actually spend some time doing this and see this remains here it's clip-based it's clip-based which means that if i move this it will stay there if i cut it will stay here see it doesn't change and this you can do this very easily using the pencil tool now after this comes the event volume handle see like this this is most dws have this right you can do this but that's on top of this see it takes into account what you did here it doesn't destroy what you did here so that means that if you do all this detailed work on a vocal especially for vocals this is really really important because you want to make them sit very well in your mix and you know slapping a compressor only it can get you there but this will give you a much better result any day i'm telling you i can guarantee that now if you say okay actually i want this to be quieter in general i can just do this okay or louder in general okay but this is still retained this is a clip based automation you might say it you might call it it's not exactly automation but you draw your volume basically and then we have the fader and here we go here's our fader okay so now after we've passed through all this we go through our inserts we go through our channel strip everything is nice and even it's smoothened out and now we can actually go to our fader and then of course if we want to automate our fader it's simple i just go like this right automation let go and maybe then so now i recorded the automation and as you can see everything comes together so nicely and of course i can edit those but i'm helping every step of the way i'm adding the pre-gain i'm adding the volume curves i'm adding the event volume you know now if i want to keep this automation but i want to make this louder or quieter i can do this you know and it will update and if i want of course i can just go and use these great functions that we have when it comes to automation you can also you know kind of compress the automation you can expand it you can tilt it all these beautiful things and to be honest with you it's very very cool the way that you can do all these things you know if you wanted to do this and you wanted to make sure that this thing doesn't have this big bump then you would have to cut here and do this and then do that but it's not so natural here i can create curves this i think the biggest secret you know because i've seen many people they want to do something like this and what they end up doing it's really sad you know when i said i'm like you know they do this but that's the final output of the channel it's not the same it's really not the same by the time you add plugins and compressors and all these things and sometimes you might be in post fader this thing will completely ruin your balance you know it won't be the same where here you take care of everything before it hits your plugins and speaking about plugins gain staging is really important with plugins some plugins can handle hot levels some other ones cannot handle hot levels some plugins are emulating analog color parts which means that if you drive them hard they will saturate you know and you might not want that for example i did a video about the black box hardware versus the plugin the plugin does exactly the same thing like the hardware if you drive it hard and you're peeking at like i don't know -3 then it will immediately start to add harmonic saturate if you want to add a little bit of subtle saturation then you need to drive the plug-in a little bit softer you shouldn't overload it or go very hot on it so use these things right use this gain stages right and i can guarantee you your mixes are going to be better you're going to be able to make your track sound louder if you do all the gain staging correctly for all your tracks so i hope you found this video useful guys i hope you enjoyed this let me know in the comments down below did you know about all these pre-game stages i'd really like to know how many of you knew about all this and i hope you make good use of it if you learned something today and you enjoyed this hit the thumbs up button it really helps me subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already and share it with any cubase user that might not know this and if you have a friend that uses another dw maybe they want to start mixing in cubase you know each to their own but for mixing this is really awesome so take care guys i'll see you next one bye

Channel: Dom Sigalas

Views: 103,884

Keywords: cubase tutorial, gain staging, dom sigalas, cubase pro, how to gain stage, gain stage, cubase gain staging, gain staging pro tools, gain staging logic pro x, how to mix loud, how to make your mixes sound professional, mixing tips, best daw for mixing, best daw mixer, dom sigalas cubase, cubase, cubase elements 10.5, cubase 10.5 pro, cubase 10 pro, cubase vs logic pro x, mixing in cubase, mastering in cubase

Id: F6_S5_EdKy4

Length: 17min 30sec (1050 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020