Doing my first mix (gain staging, etc..)

M

mintholic

New member
Hi guys. I'm a newbie who just composed a first beat and I'm about to try mixing on my own. Before I do anything, I was taught to leave all the faders at unity and do gain staging with trim plugins or whatnot to bring down the volume. Right now, I'm very confused because all of my tracks have different peak db, and I don't know which track I should deal with the peak first, so then I can work other tracks to balance around it. Because right now, I don't even know which track to even start. One track is being shown to go as low as -17 whereas one track would be at 2db.

Also, I'm not sure whether I should use the fader or the trim knob on the FreeG plugin..

For the master fader, what should be the peak level be? I heard somewhere that -18db is the sweet spot but not sure if this is indicating the individual channel fader or the master.
 
I suggest you leave the master fader at 0 dBFS. Use the individual track volume sliders to determine how loud you want each track.

Start with the kick. I usually bring up the kick until it hits -12 dBFS and then I add other instruments. Your mix will sound of course less loud than commercially mastered music but you can fix that by adding a limiter afterwards.

Any particular reason why you use FreeG?
 
manducator said:
I suggest you leave the master fader at 0 dBFS. Use the individual track volume sliders to determine how loud you want each track.

Start with the kick. I usually bring up the kick until it hits -12 dBFS and then I add other instruments. Your mix will sound of course less loud than commercially mastered music but you can fix that by adding a limiter afterwards.

Any particular reason why you use FreeG?
Click to expand...

FreeG was just what I was recommended for trim plugin. I don't know. When I was tracking, I just used faders to balance the overall tracks, but when this gain staging idea came in, everything sort of confused me. I get the idea of it and all, but still confused as to why it has its place.

When I was reading bunch of posts regarding these, I hear about -18dbfs peak limit, and also heard about the -12 dbfs for kicks as well, like you said. The more I look into it, the more confusing it gets, and I get it it's no one-way of course, but I'd like to still know what the general way is.
 
mintholic said:
FreeG was just what I was recommended for trim plugin. I don't know. When I was tracking, I just used faders to balance the overall tracks, but when this gain staging idea came in, everything sort of confused me. I get the idea of it and all, but still confused as to why it has its place.

When I was reading bunch of posts regarding these, I hear about -18dbfs peak limit, and also heard about the -12 dbfs for kicks as well, like you said. The more I look into it, the more confusing it gets, and I get it it's no one-way of course, but I'd like to still know what the general way is.
Click to expand...

Take a look at this page:

https://www.recordingrevolution.com/do-you-know-how-to-read-your-meters/

You should reach an average of -18 dB RMS. That's some kind of average. It means the peaks can be higher.

Why is that -18 dBFS such a magic number? It's something from the analog world. lots of hardware compressors, distortion units... have a VU meter and those meters are callibrated at - 18 dBFS. So 0 dBVU = -18 dBFS

Lots of plugins are emulations from hardware and those plugins can be overdriven if you send anything into them that's louder than -18 dBFS. But most analog emulation plugins have VU meter that can be calibrated to something else then -18 dBFS.

Maybe there's somebody who can explain this better.

FreeG isn't an alanog emulation so I don't know why you should use it instead of your DAW's volume slider.
 
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