hey what's going on out there i'm sean divine hope you all are doing well
today's tutorial we're gonna unpack a loaded topic which is gain staging i get a lot of
questions about it there's some things that you all are overstressing about that were
much more applicable to a previous era much more in the analog realm once we're in the daw
things are working quite a bit differently and i'm going to demonstrate this for you all
very quickly before we dive into the thick of this if you have no
idea what gain staging is it is just simply optimizing the gain or the level of our audio
throughout the entire signal flow right so you've got a gain stage here just with my preamp you know
amplifying the microphone then that may go into say a hardware compressor you've got an
input there and we're optimizing these to avoid any unwanted distortion or noise so a noise floor
or an artifact if i just play back this beat we don't have any clipping even on the stereo
buss i do have the limiter off right now but just seeing that we have healthy signals here
all right so you guys with me here this is where it gets interesting we've got the kick
and i want you to listen very closely this is just with the head room in the mix
so let's say that i was pushing this a little hotter we're going
to clip the channel a little bit so we'll bring this up to about 4db
all right so clipping both the individual track as well as the stereo bus and we're not introducing
any distortion anything undesired there but if we are to bounce this or export it to a wave this is
where the problems come so if i export this i'm going to go ahead and just do 16-bit wave
and we'll call this kick clip original kick and the kick exported clipping
that is digital distortion so we need to understand that we're in the daw we're dealing
with what's called 32-bit or 64-bit floating point processing so you don't have to understand
that on a scientific level but what it means is you know on the daw level as far as our mixer
and just processing audio outside of the plugins we have an insane amount of headroom that is not
going to be dealt with like an analog fixed point you know processing like we would clip at zero
that sort of thing it's very different the floating point processing actually gives us a lot
of flexibility here in terms of how we're routing all these signals if we go back to that kick
put it back up at four and then we route this to a bus like let's say we were going to set
up a drum bus so we're going to route the entire output down there to this bus
same thing right so we're clipping the bus as well as the output if i bring the bus
down to our original level right which would have been what it was at minus six so minus ten
so we're clipping the individual channel but now we've adjusted the bus
no clipping there and then of course no clipping on the stereo bus so if we bounce
that now let's see what happens so we'll call this kick clip bus
and the original kick all right so we had clipping on the individual channel but as
soon as we routed it to a bus adjusted that we made it out and we don't have any distortion
so just to show you by utilizing buses and routing things this way
we can avoid any issues so the floating point processing again it can be a really helpful thing
especially you know realizing that all clipping on an individual track is not necessarily a problem
as long as it's dealt with at some point now if you're in the daw and you don't necessarily know
if that track that's clipping is causing a problem and you don't necessarily want to export it and
you just want to check it there is a codec preview tool in ozone that's very useful for this purpose
so i'm going to turn off the maximizer turn on ozone and click this codec tab and if we
go to you know say 320 mp3 something like that we turn that on and then we solo this
so there we can go ahead and hear what that conversion is going to do obviously we can
hear that we're getting digital distortion caused by that kick clipping the stereo bus
the other really important aspect of gain staging that i want to cover today is at the plugin level
so that meaning a plugin has an insert or on an aux or on the stereo bus the input levels that
were feeding into plugins now the reason this is misleading is because not all plugins treat
input levels the same some plugins like this one are built to replicate their hardware predecessor
and so when we start to feed it at a certain input level it'll introduce distortion or saturation
characteristics but not all plugins do that some of the more modern plugins are not going to treat
the input level the same so trying to feed every plugin at you know a numeric value like minus 18
dbfs is not necessarily good practice or the best practice and definitely not necessary because
we have a very subjective way of dealing with input levels on the plugins what you
should do is listen use your ears when you're utilizing these plugins you will hear the way
that these change the tone right here in the daw if there's something introduced and if there is
there's some ways that we can adjust our input which i'm going to show you in just a minute
even though we have headroom right here this meter is going to be clipping in this plugin
but it's not distorting right here so let's export this
and we'll call this kick clip plug-in so the original
and the kick with the plug-in clipping they're identical even though a plug-in might indicate
that you're clipping it's not necessarily going to be an issue and that's why it's important to
listen but let's say that a plug-in did start to introduce some artifacts or some distortion
that was undesired that you did not want we would want to adjust the input level now right
now if i change the level on the mixer it's not going to change what's going into the plugin
logic specifically doesn't have what's called pre-insert gain processing but we can do the
same thing a number of ways one of them would be to just utilize the gain plug-in so put the gain
plug-in first in your chain and we'll just turn down the gain here on the gain plug-in
and you can adjust that so that you know your plug-in can optimally process that the other way
is to just utilize our region gain which in other daws is called different things but if we're in
audio we can just click that and go up here to the gain and just turn that down and that will also
affect the input level and we can adjust it that way i just put up a tutorial where
i was balancing and leveling a beat from scratch i'll put a link to it if you want to check it
out but many of you had questions about the gain staging there and why i didn't focus on that and
it's because there's a couple of things that we can do once we get the balance right and we get
the most of our our loudness and just the sound that we want we can do after the fact to where
we create headroom and we don't have to worry about introducing you know the digital distortion
some of the problems that can happen after we get out of the daw
one of those is to utilize a vca or your master fader to just bring everything back after you've
got the level right so this is the original mix this is how i mixed it and if i play that back
got no clipping on the individual tracks everything sounds the way i want it to
but we're clipping a little bit on the stereo buss
and you know once i get to mastering processing i'm going to want a little bit of headroom there
so all i have to do is just set up a vca and i can just bring that back
by approaching it this way i was able to focus on the leveling and the balance and really being
creative and not worrying about gain staging so much and then just do this after the fact
so that i can create that headroom that i need the other thing that i do is i mix into a limiter
so you guys have seen this on a lot of my videos but i will just set a limiter to you know like
minus one and then just mix into it now the reason for this is because you're gonna start to hear
the same way that we're having you know some of that digital distortion happening you're gonna
hear the way the limiter is reacting when we have this fixed point you know minus 1 db true peak
when things start to hit that if your kick for instance is mixed too loud and it's affecting
this a certain way we can go in and make some adjustments you know turn down the kick
and we're going to be able to know what that is going to do all right y'all so deep breath i know
that was a loaded topic but i hope that we covered some things that clarify the topic of gain staging
for you and also just make sure that you're not over stressing about some of these aspects that
just don't matter as much in the daw anymore i don't want you to get so focused on the visual
aspects the numerical values of gain staging that that becomes more important than the mix itself
you know get in here push some faders have fun do what sounds best use your creative intuition
let gain staging be a guide for you so that you're not reckless with levels but don't let
it be the most important thing in your entire process because i can promise you you're not
going to get the results you want if you are distracted by all of these visual indicators
and numbers that are thrown out that may or may not be the best thing for your song so i hope this
was helpful if you have any questions or concerns about gain staging we would love to hear your
input in the comments below love interacting with you guys so stay in touch with me if you learn
anything in the video please like subscribe and consider sharing we'll talk to you soon