Gain staging: the good, the bad, and the ugly
Gain staging can be a difficult, complex topic - I get questions about it all the time.
Tracks of the mix hitting red - is that ok and what level should I use?
How the achieve the right input level for plugins with or without paid plugins?
My fave artist always clips his master - is that ok?
Does True Peak matter?
I got you. I'm covering the dos and donts of gain staging, so you can use it correctly - or intentionally misuse it while being aware of what's fine and what's not, necessarily.
"Where should my kick and bass hit?" I've covered their relative levels here and here.
For a lot of help with bass (frequencies, loudness etc), find content in this Bass Collection.
All those have been my ballparks for ca. 15 years, and if you use all this info, you should have your mixes hitting quite right, too.
The Mixing and Mastering Collection now has 100 posts, phew! Dig in if mixing and mastering is your thing.
Also don't miss:
-lesson on master limiters,
-limiting/clipping for loud and punchy masters, and
-hitting maximum loudness.
RECAP of gain staging rules:
-Tracks can be really loud if you want: never good practice, but that alone won't roast your signal (thanks to floating point audio engine)…
-…as long as your master stays green.
-Levels going into plugins is a much different matter, and that's how you can easily hurt the dynamics of your signal: learn to see the visual ballpark level and go by that.
-Pushing your master into the red can work but will cause distortion whose nastiness varies between systems a lot in the worst case: by no standards is this good or great, and I am not recommending it ever at all.
-Be mindful of intersample peaks on your masters. Although they can't be seen, they may distort on some systems. Use "afclip" on MacOS Terminal to analyze your master for ISPs.
Comments (4)
So can we say, all modern plugins or stock Ableton plugins dont really care about input signal? Or its more case by case?
Purely digital plugins that don’t saturate or do dynamic processing - it’s those that don’t care, in a nutshell.
Probably the easiest thing to do in windows land is just chuck the bounced audio in Audacity and hit Show Clipping. One question, you touched on make up gain for a second there -how do you feel about tools like volume buddy that auto-compensate using the pre-fx level? I'm tempted to get it because compensating for an EQ or similar is proving too distracting but wonder if there is a hidden cost or other non-obvious concern
Volume Buddy would be fine! I wish that Hornet plugin did that. One can actually see the amount of dBs it reduces to get the desired level: I bet it’d be a piece of cake for a coder to have an output gain for the same number. I’ve created an Ableton rack that does that input/output thing: it’s just you can’t directly see the level it results in.