Today we're going to quickly go over two topics. Gain staging and level matching your plug-ins. And
there seems to be a lot of confusion about gain staging all over the interwebs, but it is really
really simple. Now we're not going to get into the analog end of things today. We're just going to go
through gain staging at your audio interface, inside your daw, and at your master fader.
All right gang, so the first rule of gain staging when you're plugging something directly into your
audio interface is don't clip your converters. That's it. That's the rule. As long as you have
a decent healthy signal and you're nowhere near clipping, you're good. That's it. It's that easy.
And with that said let's dive into the computer and i'll show you what i mean. All right so we're
here inside of Logic, but again don't worry about it being Logic. Everything i'm going to show you today
is applicable in any DAW you're using. Okay so first things first. You're going to want to
make sure that you have input monitoring turned on. Which in Logic is this little button. If you
happen to not see this button all you need to do is right click up here, go to customize control bar
and display. A little dialog box is going to pop up. And make sure that pre-fader metering is checked,
and then just hit "okay". When this is green you're gonna have pre-fader metering. So what that means
is as you're seeing the meters go up and down with the audio those meters are reflected BEFORE the
audio hits the fader. This is going to help us later on when we're level matching the plugins.
So besides the level meters on your audio interface, another way to double check when
you have input metering turned on is when you're recording audio... you see this little line right at
your mixer sitting at about minus 10dB. So at the top of the the top of the fader you're at about
minus 6dB and at the bottom you're just about -18. So if your audio input coming in is somewhere in
this range you're good to go. You're not going to be clipping your converters, you're not going to be
clipping inside your DAW. You're fine. So that part is pretty easy. So to show you what i'm talking
about, I recorded a guitar track earlier and i'll play it back and just keep an eye on the meters.
MUSIC PLAYING
Now if you saw in the meters here... and you can see where the maximum peak was, was minus 12.3dB.
This is a pretty good healthy range. It could go a little hotter,
you're going to be fine. But again, this is about the range that you want to be in.
And that's the first part of gain staging. Easy right? I told you'd it would be easy. Nothing to it. So
now let's get into level matching between plugins. Now you might ask why level matching is important
The way our ears work, if something is louder we perceive it as sounding better. But that's not
necessarily the case. So for instance, if you have a guitar track and you put a compressor on it
you don't want the compressor volume to be louder, therefore making the track seem hyped up and sound
better when it might not actually sound better at all. But if you've level matched the plugin,
if you turn the compressor on and off you'll be able to hear what the compressor is doing to the
track. You're not going to hear any difference in volume so you'll actually be able to hear
whether the compressor is improving the track, or taking away from the track without any of the
hype getting in the way. So come on! i'll show you how to do it. So i'm going to reset these meters
here quickly and we'll just play this guitar track, the original guitar track from earlier.
MUSIC PLAYING
And again we're peaking at minus 12.3dB. So now
let's open up a guitar amp. So now if we play this track with the amp on...
MUSIC PLAYING
Minus 12.4. So the same level right? So whether i turn the amp on or off,
the sound's going to change but the level's the same. So now
let's just throw it, run it through a preamp and we'll do the same thing.
We're going to reset and turn this preamp on. We're going to play it back again.
MUSIC PLAYING
Again minus 12.3. This is what i'm talking about with level matching.
So you can add some drive, you can add some gain. Whatever you need to do.
But... just pull down the fader a little bit, the output fader, this is going to vary between
plugin to plugin. But you can use this to control the level coming out of that plugin going into
the next one. So now with that on we're going to reset again... we're going to add a compressor to it.
Play this one more time.
MUSIC PLAYING
12.6. Again pretty much the same level.
And again we'll add a tape plugin on it.
MUSIC PLAYING
And 12.5. And that right there is level matching in a nutshell. All you need to do
is make sure that if you turn a plugin on or off there's no real change in volume. That way
you can hear exactly what a plugin is doing without being fooled because now the track is
a lot louder and you're being tricked into thinking it sounds better when it
might not necessarily sound better. And if you have some really good sounding analog model plugins,
you can still drive them. Some of these plugins sound really great when you really drive them hard
which you can still do. But again, just compensate by lowering the output of that plugin. So again
if you turn the plugin off and on the volume level still going to be the same. That way you
can still drive the plugin hard and get that nice saturation and distortion. But you're keeping the
level consistent going into the next plug-in. And now we'll get into the last portion, the master
fader. So when it comes to the master fader, there's two simple rules to live by. Number one. Don't EVER
clip it.. Ever! And rule number two, if you're going to be sending your track off to be mastered, leave
about 6 db of headroom for the mastering engineer to do his work. So all that means is if you're
playing back your song make sure that the loudest peaks in the song are only hitting about -6dB on
your meter. And i'll show you a quick and easy way to do that so let's dive back into the computer.
So let's just pretend for argument's sake that we have a full song here. Say we got 24 tracks of all
sorts of stuff. Now all your individual tracks might be peaking say around minus 12-ish, give
or take. But as you sum them to a buss they might actually be peaking further up because as you sum
all these channels together it's going to cause the audio to get louder. And then when the busses
sum all together into the master fader, it's going to cause that to be louder as well. And there's a
dead simple fix for that. If your bus is getting a little too hot all you have to do is add a simple
gain plug in and just dial it back a little bit. That'll take care of that problem. And same thing
on the master fader. Put the same gain plugin in, dial it down a little bit. You're good. Just
remember even on your busses and on your master fader you want to be level matching your plugins
the same as you would on any other track. One quick caveat about using the gain plug-in on your buses
or your master fader. If you've added compressors and whatnot to the buses or master fader and you
still find that it's still a little bit too hot coming out don't turn down this first gain
plugin. Because if you do it's going to affect all the plugins that are following that so your
compressor is not going to be reacting the same. So on and so forth. So what you'd want to do in
that instance is just take the very last plugin that you have, and if it has an output meter on it
somewhere, or an output volume level. Something. Just turn that down and you'll be good to go.