What you need to know about GAIN STAGING

yo-yo is going on you guys your boy DeVaughn Terrell in raw form and welcome to another help me Devon raw tutorial and today and this helped me Devon tutorial I'm going to be showing you guys something that you've been asking me for and I'm listening gain staging I'm going to explain gain staging as it relates to your recording and your mixing let's get right to it okay so right here let's explain the session first this song that I have is literally just an imported beat of stems that I have from a producer actually two producers Tyler on and Dave kappa shoutouts to them super talented dudes um and what I'm gonna do is I'm going to play you this beat literally I press command I imported the stems as the producer has sent me this is isn't touched or anything like that this is literally me just bringing the raw files right into the session I'm gonna play you this beat and what I want you to pay attention to is the meters so everything is right at zero and I want you to pay attention to the meters so look closely at the meters here we go okay so if you look at that closely you can see that on my master buss over our mix buss that it is clipping it's basically overloaded with signal and that's with everything at zero now I know what you're thinkin hey just turn down the faders on your tracks okay here is why I don't want to do that what's happening is these faders that you're seeing are post inserts and what that basically means is that everything after the inserts aka your plugins chain this fader controls that volume afterwards so basically if you try to attack it after as opposed to attacking it before it hits that fader you're really not changing much as far as it being so loud let me explain a little deeper right here I have an EQ right and I'm gonna solo this kick by itself so here's the kick solo by itself so I'm gonna play you this kick check this out what I want you to do is I want you to look at the meter on the side so look at this at this EQ and I want you to look at the meter on the side as far as the output level of what's coming out of the EQ with this look closely okay it's pretty hot and now what I'm gonna do is I'm going to take this fader and I'm gonna turn it down let's see what happens I'm gonna turn this fader way down that should give us Headroom right look closely at the same meter now as you saw the fader I turned down almost 8 DB and then when you looked in the plug-in it didn't change anything why is that it's because this fader all of these faders you see in our post plug-in it controls actual gain and volume after these plugins so what does that mean and why is this a huge mistake that people make when it comes to gain staging and don't worry I'm explaining it to you just watch me closely let's say for instance I boost this kick I'm gonna do some processing and I boost this kick let's say I boost it to dB at the 120 hurt range not saying that's correct but let's just say I do that look at the meter on the right hand side I'm clipping and all I did was add a 2 DB of gain in a certain frequency range now what's gonna happen when I add analog saturation to that kick or if I decide to add a transient shaper if I decide to add a bunch of different processes to this kick guess what you're gonna be doing you're gonna be clipping at the plug-in and that is gain staging ladies and gentlemen this is why you want to accomplish and do it the correct way and I'm gonna show you exactly how to gain stage now before we go any further I'd be remiss if I didn't read you a definition and I'm not saying you have to understand the definition but listen closely gain staging is the process of managing the relative levels in each step of an audio signal flow to prevent introduction of noise and distortion feed the inserts I'll stop there so basically what you're trying to accomplish is an optimal level you want to make sure that what is coming into your plugins is an optimal signal something that you have actual Headroom so that you can maneuver you can do processing and it won't clip and it won't cause so much digital distortion because that's the one to store so we don't like we don't like digital distortion so with that said this is how I like to go about it everything is at zero and it sounds fine for now but we know that after a while after adding a lot of processing and things of that nature that basically it's going to be a mess this mix is gonna sound terrible this is the probably the biggest difference between professional mixes and amatuer mixes so how do we gain stage right how do we make sure that what is coming on to these faders is a signal that even if I have at zero gives me some Headroom to actually do processing and move and just overall sonically sound better so this is what I like to do this is what a lot of people actually do what I like to do with something called clip gain okay and this is from my pro twos users and then I'll explain for my users of other programs when you click clean this is kind of like what the board's up in the big studios have when you see at the very top where it says game or trim or something like that what I like to do is click game gives you the flexibility and ability to turn down the audio file before it hits the inserts it can add your plugins I come right over here and I can bring this down so let's bring this down to negative five point six so now the clip we click game this down negative five point six all that's telling pro twos is this signal right here on this track turn it down 5 point 6 dB before it even hits my plugins or anything like that this is called clip gaining I am gain staging stay with me so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna play you this kick and let's take a look at this EQ plug-in let's take this off now once again look at the EQ ladies and gentlemen I just made sure that that audio that was coming in to this actual channel path was optimal and that it wasn't clipping and that I had Headroom so that I can literally do anything I want as far as processing for that signal I am gaining staging I am making sure that this signal that's coming in is optimal it isn't loud it isn't clipping so that I can actually fix it and do what I want to it without introducing any noise in that signal path all right so now what I'm gonna show you is and for the sake of time for this video I've already made a gain staging already clip gain most of these tracks right here so I copy and pasted it over in Pro Tools and I just click gained everything down so what I did was I click gain all of these tracks down to negative 5.6 as you can see right here so if you look right here you see all of these tracks I clip them down to negative five point six now how did I land on five point six as far as my gain staging is concerned well the reason is because I usually know that the kick is probably going to be the loudest most the loudest thing that's gonna eat up the most Headroom in my mix in general so if I can get that thing that's eating up the most that's the most transient thing in my mix to peak at a certain level that I like then I can assume that everything else I'm gonna put the same level so that my mix as far as what the producers sent me doesn't change if you take everything down and just you know if you grouped it all and just brought it all down one level but it doesn't change sonically it's just it's just lower now in volume so that's basically what you're accomplishing I didn't change or alter the mix of the producer all I did was turn it all down so that when I add processing I can actually do that without clipping or adding any Distortion so here's my clip trick of my click game regions I brought it down negative five point six so now I'm gonna play this for you look at my meters [Music] now obviously you can hear that it is lower but the beauty of it is that now I'm not clipping on my stereo master or my mix or my mix buss now granted usually I would probably clip gain this down a little bit excuse me a lot more until I look on my mix buss and probably see around negative 6 dB as far as the peaks overall but you can get the idea I did that for the sake of the video it'll be a little too quiet for you to hear so that's how I like to basically just kind of gauge it I go from the kick I say alright let me get this kick to maybe a negative 9 DB and then everything else at negative 9 DB and then look at my mix buss and see if it where the peaks are actually hitting and then I'll clip gain everything and now guess what I have all of this Headroom to manipulate EQ compress all of those audio signals as I please so when it comes to clip gaining you guys just understand that it's basically a safety precaution it's a way to make sure that what signal that you're the signal that you're using you have actual room to to breathe and it creates so much Headroom if you just gain stage so you're basically like we said let's go back to that definition one last time one sec once again now let's reiterate it to you see if it makes sense gain staging is the process of managing the relative levels in each step of an audio signal flow to prevent introduction of noise and distortion feeding the inserts such as equalizers compressors with the right amount of signal particularly in the analog realm so what is the signal flow path we have the imported stems from the producers it's hitting the inserts of this track and then it's hitting the fader of this track so what do we do we make sure that the actual stems that come in are low so that it's not coming into our inserts hot because if it comes into our inserts aka our plugins hot and guess what when we add even the smallest a bit of processing it's going to clip that signal so you have to turn it down so that you don't you can avoid that problem and a lot of times I know a lot of you guys said a lot of producers a lot of times we'll send you beats and it'll be clipping all over the place this is why clip gaining last thing I'm going to show you guys and this is for people that don't have Pro Tools what you can do is in most da WS I say the majority there is a plugin that you have in your arsenal it's called the gain tool or the trim tool in Pro Tools we have one called the trim and what you can do is accomplish the same exact thing so you want to put it at that you want to put the game tool or the trim two at the very top of your processing the very first thing you want to do this is what's coming into the coming into your Sigma path this is just like a board like an SSL board an eboard you see it right there on the top you see Gaynor trim majority of the time what you do is you turn it down so just how I did negative five point six guess what negative five point six I can put it right there and I can literally take this and put it across all of these channels just like that just put it across all of these channels and now all my channels all my all my audio signals will be down negative five point six now you do this according to your taste and stuff like that sometimes I go more or less around to the negative ten when it comes to clique names depending on how hot the producer has sent it to me but that's basically how I do that I use you can use the trim tool or the gain tool to basically accomplish your gain staging and this works with vocals as well when you come to your vocals and gain staging a lot of times what you want to do is to make sure that you're not just boosting volume is make sure that when you put a compressor on a vocal right make sure that you keep by passing back and forth to see if you're actually getting a louder signal or a lower signal what I like to do is I like to make sure that the compressed signal is just as loud as the original signal coming in so I'll keep bypassing to make sure that it doesn't go skyrocket in volume that's also another form of gain staging as well that you should look out for and that's the best way to tell if if adding just volume is what's causing you to think it sounds better when actually it's not and that's how that goes so you guys I hope that was a great explanation on gain stage and make sure you comment like subscribe make sure you follow us at help me Devon on the Instagram make sure you go check out help me Devon got info that is our new site that is up with templates drum kits etc make sure you have if you have any comments or concerns anything like that make sure you hit me in the description excuse me in the comments below and um yeah until next time you guys

Channel: Help Me Devvon

Views: 101,492

Keywords: mastering, mastering tutorial, how to master a song, master, mixing, audio mastering (industry), tutorial, how to master, music production, recording, how to, producer, audio engineering, easy, fl studio, how to master music, plugins, mastering music, home studio, logic pro x, home mastering, mastering plugins, simple, mastering in fl studio, mixing tutorial, how to master in fl studio, audio mastering, mastering plugin, learn mixing, template, recording template

Id: myHPBYa0eTQ

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 13 2020