there seems to be a lot of confusion about what gain staging is I've had a lot of messages and I've also sent a lot of people on forums online quite confused I'm Michael you're watching in the mix and today we're going to be sharing with you three guidelines that we follow in every single song just to keep us on track with gain staging as far as I'm concerned gain staging is all about having the right signal level at all points in your chain whether you're working in analog or digital this is still important for many different reasons but the analog side of things is important to make sure you record at the right level mix at the right level master at the right level so that you don't incur access tape noise console hum and just sort of unwanted noise in general and for the digital world where most of us are working these days it's still important even though you don't have to deal with any of the noise any of the hiss and any of the hum induced by analog hardware the guidelines in this video are all about keeping you on the right track avoiding unwanted clipping and making sure that your levels are all good the first one is about not clipping the mixbus the second one is about feeding your plugins at the right volume so that they're working and they don't distort and they're given the right sort of energy and the third guideline is about how to optimize your fader position for the best resolution possible like I said the first part is all about making sure you don't clip your mixbus we're always told to leave Headroom in a mix so that you can master it so there's no clipping and distortion and all sorts of stuff but how do you actually give yourself Headroom well if your mix is clipping best place to start is to just grab all of the faders and just pull them down slightly until it's no longer clipping or you could identify a source that's too loud often bass or a kick drum just has an awful lot of energy and can push through the mix and cause it to clip so the first thing to do would be to pull down the faders and get rid of that clipping from the star once your mix is not clipping what you want to do is make sure that your plugins are working at the right volume this is a topic that most beginners sort of aren't aware of but it's actually really easy to grasp lots of plugins especially analog modeled plugins do not respond in a linear manner they have a nonlinear response and what this means is that when you input a different amount of signal they behave in very different ways if you input too much signal they distort if you don't input enough signal they just don't have the good effects that you them to have there's often a good range of volume that you want to be feeding into these plugins and usually this is about minus 18 DB although this is just a guideline and anywhere in that sort of range is okay now the way that we achieve this is to put a game unit at the start of every single effects change we like to use the slate digital trimmer because it has an output in vu and in DB and it just helps us get everything in the right ballpark we know that when the vu meter is hovering around about zero we're sitting in a good position where we're not going to be distorting our eq's our compressors our reverbs but we're also going to be getting the right kind of energy out of them and then to make sure that we're not building up too much volume we just make sure that we turn the output of each VST down so that when we bypass it the volume stays around about the same and this way you're not just adding loads more gain and potentially clipping your mix bus which would take us back to step one there are some plugins that do respond in a linear manner and if that's the case then it doesn't matter what volume you feed into them and feeding -18 DB into them won't harm them the third part is all about optimizing your fader position so sometimes in our old mixes we used to have the faders very low and I didn't really think much of this at the time but what it did is remove my ability to make very fine changes easily you see if your fader is at the top around about zero or unity you have a lot of control you can move it quite a lot and it's only moving a DB or so but if you drag it all the way down if you start moving it a little bit you start jumping in two or three five DB at a time so you lose a lot of control there the problem is if you've gain stage right through your effects turning up all the way to zero might just make it far too loud so what you can do is put a gain unit at the end of the effect chain so now we have one at the start and one at the end what you could do is take say 15 DB of gain away and then push your fader up 15 DB get it close to zero and your fader will have lots of resolution and your effects will be running at all the right volume and you won't be clipping your mixbus and those are the only three guidelines that we think are important when you're working inside the D aw there's one little myth that I'd like to clear up in a moment but when it comes to working inside the door super easy way to achieve it it's just to put it gain unit at the start of your effects chain and it at the end and just use those to control the levels into your plugin and the level hitting your fader and then the level in your mix bus the one thing that I just wanted to clear up that I've read online people were saying that if you do that and you take gain away and then push the fader up people are saying that you'll induce a lot of historic into the recording and in a digital audio workstation unless there's a fault this simply isn't gonna happen you're not pulling a noise floor up in a da w most dear w's don't have any kind of audible noise floor whatsoever the way you would have with the tape machine or an analog console and to demonstrate this I've taken a guitar recording and I've removed gain from it then I've printed it out and exported it then I've added gain with the fader exported it I've done this process 20 times and then I've level matched it and you'll be able to hear the one with zero processing and then the one that's had gain added and removed 20 times and you're hear that there's absolutely no difference in the noise floor hiss hum buzz in the sample it's simply not something you need to worry about so hopefully this video has clarified a little bit about gain staging I hope it's simplified it in your mind and it's not something that you're stressing about anymore da w's do make gain staging very very easy these days if anyone would like me to make a video showing how we gain stage specifically inside FL Studio I can make that video just leave a comment down below and we'll see about making it if you did enjoy this video or found it helpful please do leave a like and subscribe it helps us out enormous ly thank you very much for watching I'll see you in the next video [Music]