Let's Debate: Multiple Volume Controls

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KennyTroy

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Volume. Loudness. Headroom. Peak Levels. Clipping. What is it? Gain-Structure.

More likely than not you have heard of these terms and wondered how to properly and efficiently adjust variables to give you a more "professional" mix. Well in all honestly I'm in the same boat, let's discuss.

Three ways in which you most likely control you volume levels are through using the following faders:

Channel Volume (found on the Step Sequencer)
Mixer Volume (found on the Mixer)
Synth Output-Level Control (the synth's main volume level)

Which do you most frequently use in your mix, and why?

In all honesty I have never used the Synth Output-Level Control to adjust for volume. More often than not I am using the Mixer volume fader, and on occasion when I am layering several synths in the same channel/mixer I will adjust their individual Channel volume levels.

An article on Sound on Sound (Gain Staging In Your DAW Software) discussed gain-staging and proposed the idea that it is more effective to use the Synth Output-Level volume fader as opposed to the channel or mixer volume faders because "they won't affect the level flowing from your synth to any insert processors you add."

What are you opinions on this, or what do you do to adjust volume levels in your mixes?

Your suggestions for gain-staging and volume control?
 
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I use FL Studio. The mixer faders in it are "post-effects". If I want to affect how much is being input into the first plugin on my effects chain, I'd adjust the output of the synth or the gain in the audio clip (assuming the effect plugin doesn't have an input knob). That might be useful for some sort of compressor, gate, or distortion plugin where the input level matters.

When adjusting the level of something with all effects and plugins being applied, I would use the mixer fader.
 
Well, there's nothing really to discuss about.
Proper gain staging means that on every point in the signal path the levels are set right and this is a must. :)
 
Not too keen on that but almost every single time I just leave my master channel at 0db and only mess with volume of everything else when making a bump/beat.
Not sure why you'd wanna mess with master channel but limiters and compressors make sense alil to me.
 
It's an important topic. The gain/volume control is a multiplication algorithm on the signal, so you have the signal flowing through this multiplication algorithm that in turn signals the dBFS relative signal to the output stage of the converter. The output stage of the converter then outputs that signal as a voltage/power level, that voltage/power level is following a cumulative volts curvature. This means that it is incredibly essential to be aware of the cumulative nature of leveling/gain staging in two dimensions. It's like having a zooming glass on top of another zooming glass. Poorly gain staged mixes have smaller and less detailed zooming glasses and those hence set at less effective configurations. So gain staging 101 is really to have the right gear to begin with, you cannot get whatever gain staging quality from whatever gear, that's important to know, because that is determined by the capacity of the gear fixed to certain levels. Assuming that your gear is at a pro level, the gain staging process is driven by the monitoring process. So there is power - the amount of signal you feed the monitors, and loudness - the mix frequency response relative to your ear's frequency response. Gain staging and peak limiting go hand in hand, because peak limiting works against the cumulative nature of the gain control, by allowing the engineer to put a fixed ceiling on the frequency amplitude of the frequencies within the various frequency bands. Due to the fact that a peak limiter acts on those frequencies that exceed the threshold, it means that it is by default kind of random what it really does to the signal. A gain control in front of the brickwall peak limiter, can help ensure the limiter acts on the wrong frequencies, this is poor gain staging. But a great monitoring process will help you discover that. A gain control after the brickwall peak limiter can ensure that those frequencies that were damaged by the brickwall peak limiter are zoomed in on. This is poor gain staging. But a great monitoring process will help you discover that.

So, good gain staging requires an understanding of the cumulative nature of gain increase, how the signal will flow through the various stages of processing and a great monitoring process is your insurance against a poor gain staging process. By default you are kind of left with a limiter, a gain/volume control before the D/A and a gain/volume control after the D/A. Therefore, it is good to route the signal within your mix, in such a way that you are able to control the gain and limiting of various frequency bands without damaging the stereo image. This is one step towards a higher quality gain staging.

But everything goes back to the production and recording. Because if you need to make really drastic gain/volume/limiting moves in order to balance the mix, it means you need to move from the naturally played frequency response, to a fake one. Faking the sounds like this and blending that together, spells disaster, not from an audio point of view, but from a musical point of view. This is possible mostly due to a poor monitoring process during production and recording. So the musicality of a music creation is mostly determined during production and recording, but a great monitoring process (allowing a great gain structure process) throughout the whole music creation process, will enable the engineer to preserve and increase that musicality throughout the music creation process by highlighting the various issues that are already present or morph into the recording.

The issue with poor recording rooms is that you get build ups in certain frequency ranges, the more build ups, the more will the mix engineer have to musically damage the signal until it is in balance. So everything has to be made right as early in the music creation process as possible. When it is made right like that and when that is then processed by the right gear and skills, then you get a great end result. In other words gain staging can work against you, or it can work to your benefit. In musical terms I like to use the term "polarity" for that, you have a positive polarity when the gain staging works to increase the natural beauty of the music and you have a negative polarity when the gain staging works to decrease the natural beauty of the music. It is good to know that all dimensions of the music creation process, such as for instance the musicality dimension, has polarity and power/level/amount at that polarity. It is the power/level/amount of the polarity of each component in the music creation process relative to each other, that determines where your focus/energy/investments should go and that is structured so that it naturally increases closer and closer to the original frequencies.
 
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that is one hell of an answer!
i think this the best iv'e heard gain staging explained and i've learned quite a few new things.
Thanks!
 
One step that folks often miss is calibrating their meters. If you have multiple amounts of gear with meters, you should run test tones through everything (at once) and make sure the meters are aligned. Also taking into account the difference between digital and analog "0." Meters don't do any good in guiding you on volume if they aren't metering correctly.

GJ
 
For output with your signal path being all digital, it doesn't matter too much.

Some virtual synths and processors may add emulated saturation (distortion) as you add gain within the plugin. This will affect the sound but it has more to do with processing rather than gain staging.

Typically, I only use the mixer faders in the DAW. I never touch the master unless I'm bring lazy and have a ton of channels that I don't want to turn down one by one. But that's only happened like once or twice and never during mixing.

For inputs, most beginners will only have the pre-amp for microphones and that's the only gain staging you really need to worry about at that point. Everything else should be left at 0. With a mixing console, it'll be pretty much the same idea depending on how much routing you can do. When I had a larger console, I would set my input levels with the pre-amp only, since it would send the signal to my interface pre-fader. This meant that it didn't matter if I had my mixer fader at -20 or 0 since my signal was routed to my interface well before that. The fader only affected my monitoring levels. In the case where I use post-fader for whatever reason, I set the fader to 0, set my gain according to what I was recording, and then used the fader for minor adjustments. If you have a situation where your signal is being recorded post-fader and you're moving the mixer fader too much, it probably means you should lay off the fader and adjust the gain instead.

If you bought a mixer and you have the manual, it typically has a diagram somewhere in the end or towards the end where it shows how your signal routes. This looks confusing at first glance, but you just have to follow the lines to see where your signal goes. In that respect, it's very simple. This is also important since you generally want your signal to follow the shortest routes. Some mixers have direct outputs, which will usually give you the shortest path. Sometimes, your sends may have the shortest signal path if you don't have a direct output.

Regarding this
An article on Sound on Sound (Gain Staging In Your DAW Software) discussed gain-staging and proposed the idea that it is more effective to use the Synth Output-Level volume fader as opposed to the channel or mixer volume faders because "they won't affect the level flowing from your synth to any insert processors you add."
Click to expand...

I would ignore that as being too general. If you already have your processors as inserts and you adjust the gain on the plugin, at the very least you're going to ruin your compression and you're going to have to re-work that all over again.
 
Thank you all for your insight, more helpful than you could imagine. I always find it important to find out how others work in the studio, whether it be learning something new, improving on something I personally do, or rethinking a habit that could really be detrimental (even if I don't know it is).
 
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