The old ways of analog gain staging naturally led to that, but it wasn't the point. This way you won't let volume changes fool your perception and will be able to adequately judge the changes you're making. Make sure no plugins in any given chain change the signal volume. There is one very useful mixing tip regarding gain staging. What do you do that for? If the answer is "because that's what they told me", then you're not doing it right.) (Really tho, you ought to ask this question every time you do anything in the mix. But do they even? I don't think any of the ones I used (admittedly I mostly use unashamedly DSP ones, but I got around some anal-mod stuff in my time) do that. If your plugins distort when driven above -18dB (and if you don't want them to), you're using crappy plugins. Generally you don't want to exceed 0dB at any point in the chain, but that's where your gain staging ends with digital. But a big difference is, plugins don't go nonlinear unless they are told to. Now, when mixing in the box, you kinda have the same goal of not introducing unwanted crap into your mix. It had one positive side effect, which I'll come to later, but that's it. This, among other things, required a lot of headroom.ĪND THAT'S IT. So back when personal computers and DSP were not a thing, engineers looked carefully not to drive any and every piece of equipment into distortion. Its original purpose is not to push any equipment into nonlinear territory and not to introduce any unwanted distortion. That being said, do you even understand what gain staging is needed for? Rather, I have gripes with the specific understanding of gain staging you and many others demonstrate. I'm gonna sound rude, but not because of personal gripes. Doing so I ensure the level remains the same or, if I want, I can set the last VUMeter reference to 0VU/-12dbFs if I want to raise the overall volume of the track from those initial -18dbFs.ĭo you think this is a better way to do it than using different stuff? I am talking for example about using HorNet Normalizer of GainMatch for achieving the “same” result.Ĭould anybody tell me what are their thoughts about this and if the workflow example I wrote is a good, “proper” way? Then I check the VUMeter inserted as last part of the chain so that I can manage to add or remove gain according to the various plugins (EQ, Comp, Sat, etc). The first instance is for making sure that the level of my software instrument/audio recording is around 0VU/-18dbFs.ĭoing that, I ensure the level feeding the plugins is around -18dbFs, which is the so called “sweet spot” for analog-modelled plugins. So, first off, I use Klanghelm VUMeter as first and last plugin of a track’s chain. I would like to talk about gain staging and what could be a proper way to do it based on my workflow.
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