What's the Difference Between Gain and Volume?

hey guys matt bell with electric violin shop here wanted to answer a question that we get a lot from people that are new to the uh the world of amplified music and it's what is the difference between gain and volume because when i turn up the gain it gets louder when i turn up the volume it gets louder why are there two and what's the difference okay so let's get into this a little bit gain is input level into the amps uh and we'll say into the guts of the amp and volume is output level that's going to the speaker so let's look at the sections of the amp you've got your instrument that comes into the pre-amplifier section of the amp and every amp that has a pre-amplifier section because that's what brings the instrument level that your instrument has up to line level that the inside of the amp can work with and then it goes through the eq and the effects and then it goes to the power amplifier which drives the speaker and so if we look at the gain is what drives the pre-amplifier section and volume is what drives the power amplifier that goes to the speaker so the reason we use gain is because each instrument has its own different output level some instruments are louder than others and gain is what allows us to compensate for that if i've got a yev is a very loud instrument and i've got an aurora that's a little bit of a quieter instrument i'll have to set my gain higher for the aurora than i will for the yev so that the amount of signal going through the eq and the effects is about the same and then the power amplifier drives how hard that speaker hits so gain is input level volume is output level gain does color your tone some because that gain that preamp section is um if you've got a tube amplifier when you when you hit that tube the harder you drive it the more uh distortion you're going to get so the gain does color your tone some volume colors your tone a lot less so as you're turning that gain up you're going to hear the quality of your tone is going to change and then volume in theory pretty much just makes you louder so i hope that i hope that clears up any confusion between what gain is and what volume is and uh hope that helps you set your amp right okay thank you guys for hanging out

Channel: Electric Violin Shop

Views: 55,108

Keywords: gain, volume, amp, tutorial, how to, amplifier, sound engineering

Id: HTMH2EHZnZc

Length: 2min 36sec (156 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 23 2020