Making my stuff as LOUD as possible!!!

BillJV

BillJV

New member
Hehehe... did I get all of the ME's attention with that subject line? I thought so. :p

But... since I've got you here... I have a couple of questions about gain staging. I think I've been doing something like this, but I'm not sure if what I'm doing is what you're talking about when you say it. I could be totally off-base here, tho. Does gain staging mean using submix busses and controlling the levels going to the master bus by means of one or more submix or aux stems, attenuating the signals at the submix level before hitting the master bus?

Thanks in advance...

Bill
 
Gain-staging is just making sure of and being aware of the gain at every single possible step. Headroom is good room.

The best way to make sure you'll NEVER have a recording with a decent "loudness potential" is to try to make it "loud" too soon. Track too hot and that's it. Hit a buss too hard and you're done. Sum the signal too hot somewhere and goodbye.

You get one chance at good headroom - After that, you have to protect it at all costs or it's gone for good. You can't "turn it down again" once it's gone.
 
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At the tracking stage, you essentially only need a gain knob. You set a decent gain, not too much, not too little, and the fader stays at 0.

You drive the gain too hard and the pre is going to be driven, which will give you some distortion. Limiting is distorting the signal, which we perceive as loudness. If the signal is already distorted at the tracking stage, then you'll get way more distortion than you want if/when you limit.

So, set the gain, check for when the signal clips, back down a little bit, then back down a little more until you feel comfortable that your clip led won't come on at all. Forget the fader even exists.

At the monitoring stage, callibrate your gear. Send a test signal out of the daw and set your channel gain on the mixer so that the signal reads accordingly. Keep in mind that 0dbfs does not equal udbu. This is one of the few times when looking at the meter will be helpful. Again, faders will stay at 0 for the most part. Any other volume compensation should be done by the monitoring knob.

During mixing, well, this is where you go crazy with the faders.
 
I seem to find myself in situations where my recording levels are good, not too hot, not too soft - but as I add tracks and more stuff gets in the mix, the submix channels start to creep up and up in level, forcing me to attenuate them (which I am assuming brings down headroom as well) so that I'm not driving too hard at the two-channel stereo mix stage. At certain times I've actually had to start a mix from scratch again because my levels just got out of control, especially when using EQ on certain parts, which increases the gain sometimes on particular tracks.
 
Attenuating almost everything (sometimes everything) in a mix to keep the headroom is totally normal.
 
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