 Hi folks, I'm Mike and I hope you're well. Gain staging. This is a term you'll see around an awful lot. I've made a couple of videos about it and it's definitely a process which I recommend in your productions. However, you will see posts and videos from other people saying they don't believe in it. They think it's completely unnecessary in the digital realm. They think it's a complete waste of time. But normally as I dig into these opinions, I find that those people's definition of gain staging is a little different from mine and other people's. In fact, I think they often are gain staging, even though they don't actually call it that. More on that later. But first of all, I'd like to thank the sponsor of this video, DistroKid. If you follow the VIP discount link in the description down below, you'll get 7% off an already amazing price to distribute your music to all of the major platforms. So before we talk about what gain staging is, I think we first need to define what a gain stage is. A gain stage is any point in the production where you can control gain. So for example, when you first start off by plugging a microphone into your audio interface, you normally set a level using a gain control. This is a gain stage, a place where you can control gain. There may be other hardware which you're using where you can control gain as well. But for most of us, the other stages or the other gain stages are within the door itself. So let's take a look at that. In this particular project, we can see at the top of this channel here, there's actually a control for gain. Okay, so this is a gain stage. If we move down and look at there's a couple of plugins here, let's open one of them. The first one here, we can actually control gain with these two controls, an input control and an output control. So this is a gain stage. Now it's not always that obvious. If we close this plugin and look at the next plugin down, you may not think you're controlling gain here, but with this EQ you actually are. Every time you create a node like this or an EQ band, you are controlling gain. Normally, this has got a gain control here to increase or decrease the gain for that group of frequencies or that frequency range. Okay, so sometimes you're not aware that you're affecting gain, but you are. Okay, moving on from there, another typical example is where with this channel, I've done a send to a bus. Okay, and I've got control over the level, the signal that I send to that bus. I would call this a gain stage. I can control the gain with this level control here. Now, as we look further down the chain, we normally always have a fader on the channel. Now, this is arguably not a gain control. There's a little bit of a difference between gain and volume, which I'm actually going to discuss later. But I kind of think of this as a gain stage, especially if this channel is then going off to a bus, which these two piano channels we can see here next to each other are, they're both going off to this piano bus, okay, which is all the way over here. Now at the top of that bus, we have a gain control. Okay, so there's another gain stage. However, the signal going into this bus is also affected by the faders back on these two piano channels. So in this sense, I think of this as a gain stage. Okay, so really that just continues through all the different routing and buses that you may have with all of their effects and sends within the project all the way through to what is normally the final bus, the master bus. So all of these points where we can adjust gain are called gain stages. So gain staging is simply the process of managing all of the gain stages within a project for the purpose of maintaining a healthy signal. Now we've got a new term to define. What is a healthy signal? Actually, whether we're recording in either the analog or the digital world, when we're talking about a healthy signal, we're primarily concerned with two extremes. First of all, with low level recordings, we're concerned with something called the noise floor. We're going to talk about that in a moment. In terms of high level recordings or hot signals, as we sometimes call them, we're concerned with clipping. However, when we are talking about either the analog or the digital world, these two extremes have quite different considerations. Let's start off by talking about the noise floor. So the noise floor is created by unwanted noise, which is there in the signal as a byproduct of the equipment or the processes we are using. Let's say, for example, a signal has some noise down here, and we record our vocal just above it here. Okay, that's going to be a quiet vocal. Later on, when we decide we want to increase the volume of that vocal, we turn it up. We are going to be turning up the noise, which is baked into that signal along with it. And we're going to make the noise even louder. Usually, that's very undesirable. So what we try to do is create a big gap between that vocal, or whatever it is we're recording, and the noise floor so that when we have to turn the vocal up, we are increasing the noise floor, but only by a little bit, we're probably still not going to notice it. Now, this is especially true in the analog recording process, where there may be lots of equipment involved. There's cables involved, which can involve interference. There's actual sort of hums and things and hisses within the equipment itself, whether it's tape or whether it's things like hardware compressors, etc. You get the idea in the analog world, there's far more potential for noise or unwanted noise. Now, I've heard it said occasionally that there basically is no noise floor in digital recording. That's almost true, but really not quite true. The only time where I believe that's really true is when you've entirely generated the sound digitally. So for example, perhaps in your door, you've got a virtual synthesizer, you've generated some sound, and there's just no noise in there. But that's the only circumstances I can think of where that's true. Whenever we're actually recording some real world thing, though, either using a microphone or with a synthesizer via cables or with a guitar via cables, etc., we may be using preamps, we may be using some outboard gear, then we're going to have some noise in the signal. However, it is true to say as a generalization, normally in the process of digital recording, we do introduce a lot less noise than we used to with analog recording. So we can afford for that vocal to be a little closer to the noise floor than it was previously when we recorded only in analog. But why would we want to do that? Well, that's mainly when we're concerned with clipping. In analog recording, usually people wanted to get that signal as far away from the noise floor as possible, so they recorded pretty loud. Now they happen to discover as well that as the signal started to distort when clipping occurred, the sound that they got wasn't actually that bad. Sometimes it was quite desirable, there was a sort of a pleasant effect with it. However, with digital recording when clipping occurs, when the signal gets too loud, it's hardly ever regarded as desirable. Let's have a listen. I've recorded this guitar here, and I've processed it digitally just to make sure it's clipping. Big time, okay? So let's have a listen to it. It's just brittle and edgy and just not nice, okay? Now the interesting thing is, even if I try and compensate for this by turning the volume down using the fader, actually let's just talk about that for a moment. When we're talking about volume as opposed to gain, volume is really more about the output level, what you actually hear. So what you're going to hear in a moment is, I can actually make this guitar quieter by turning the volume down with the fader. But all I'm actually doing is maintaining the sound characteristics, a clipped signal just quieter. Have a listen. And this is really important because it demonstrates that at a certain point we can't actually get rid of digital clipping or clipping just by turning volume down and compensating for it at the end of the train. Now in this case, this was, this is actually baked into the waveform as we can see here. But even if the clipping had been caused, because of my settings somewhere in one of the plug-ins for example, with every gain stage process after that, whether it's another plug-in, whether it's a send or whether it's indeed the fader, we can't get rid of that clipping which is occurring. We'll just simply be making the clipping quieter, okay? So that's why for me, gain staging, maintaining a healthy level throughout the whole process is really important. Okay, I need to address this, but I don't want to get into the weeds of it too much. I don't want to get too technical. But some people definitely will point out that with modern doors, because we are processing sound, perhaps a 32-bit floating point processing, that there's no perceivable clipping which occurs. That is true. Let's talk about that. These different bit depths that we record at 16, 24, 32 floating point have very different capabilities in terms of dynamic range, okay? So the point where we have worked between our noise floor and the point where we start clipping. It's probably true to say that with 32-bit floating point processing, what's not probably, I mean, it's really true to say that you just can't get it to clip. You may have noticed in your door that even though your meters are showing, you know, your signal going right into the red by a long way that you can't hear that awful clipping that we listened to earlier. And this is one of the main sort of arguments gain staging against its necessity, I guess. And I think it's a pretty valid point, actually, in terms of thinking about clipping. However, there's some things you should be aware of, at least one main thing you should be aware of. Just because your door is capable of processing audio at that bit depth doesn't mean that the plugins, especially older plugins, are actually going to be able to handle or process things in the same way. So you may still get some clipping occurring within plugins, it's definitely something you should be aware of. For me, there's a few key gain stages which are pretty important. First of all, probably the most important is the actual input stage where you're actually recording something with your audio interface and you're setting the gain there. If you get unpleasant clipping at that stage, it's baked into the recording and you can't get rid of it. So this is an actual key stage for gain staging. The other point which is pretty important to me is after I've used a plugin, okay, that's something called level matching. I generally want the level to be roughly the same on the output as it was on the input so that I can know that the plugin is doing its work and improving things in some way, not just making it louder and also to make sure that there's an appropriate level as we go into the next plugin. Now finally, a really important stage for me is the actual master bus. Now, there's a lot of talk about levels for this specific levels where people like to have their master bus peaking. I'd say the most important thing is it's not clipping. But for me personally, I like to have a little bit of wiggle room for mastering so I roughly aim for a peak of around about minus six decibels for some other people, it's minus three. The most important thing is it's below zero. If it's exported and it's below zero and you want to create some wiggle room, you can always just turn it down a little bit at the beginning of the mastering process. Now, of course mastering is something that you will do before you finally release your music. When I do release my music, I do it through our sponsor DistroKid. They make the process super easy. You just upload your track, you upload some artwork, fill in a really simple form and they do the rest for you. They get it out to all of the major platforms including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, etc. etc. Super easy. If you want to release your music, follow the link for that in the description down below. Now, if I'm guilty of anything in my previous videos about gain staging, it's giving the impression that gain staging is this kind of mammoth task which all needs to be done in one hit before you start mixing. I hope I've put this across in some of my other videos, but it's not really true. It's definitely something I would check before I start the mixing stage because I don't really see the point in trying to mix when you're not at optimal levels with your tracks to begin with. However, it really results in me sort of sitting down for an hour before I start mixing and going, right, let's do some gain staging and going through that sort of process because it just sort of happens along the way. To be honest with you, obviously it happens at the beginning with the actual tracking or recording process and it'll happen along the way as I use plug-ins or create busses etc. So it's not this big long sort of boring task that you need to do all in one hit before you start mixing. So I apologize for that. Now, whilst I certainly don't believe in rigid numbers for levels that you might aim for in gain staging, if you do want a little bit of guidance with that or some temporary targets that you can make use of until you find your own, you may want to watch a more detailed video about gain staging which I've made. You can watch it right here. Remember, they're just guides.