In this video, which is part of my "how to mix" series, I'm going to explain what
gain staging is, and how to set it up in FL Studio.
Gain staging is one of the easiest and most crucial tasks when it comes to music production,
yet it's often overlooked.
If you don't care about gain staging it may become more difficult to get a good sounding
mix.
So take some time to set this up properly.
It only takes a few seconds, and it will save you plenty of time and effort later on.
So what is gain staging?
Simply put, gain staging is the procedure of getting a healthy signal flow within your
daw.
The whole point of gain staging is to make sure that you're not clipping anywhere.
Now, I could go on talking about analogue vs digital headroom, floating point, and so
on, but why make it more difficult than it has to be?
You don't need to know all this in order to gain stage properly.
To make a long story short; Gain staging used to be done very differently back in the analogue
days.
And I think this is part of the reason why there's so much confusion around it today.
Back then, you needed to take into account things such as signal to noise ratios.
Avoiding noise was a crucial part of the gain staging process.
In a Digital Audio Workstation however, this is no longer an issue, so today we gain stage
very differently.
There's several ways to set up gain staging.
Some people prefer one method over the other, and some may say that you need to reach a
specific decibel level and so on.
Let's just ignore that for now, as it's not really important.
What's important is that you keep your levels down from the very first source, into the
next, and the next until it ends up in the master bus.
The only thing that really matter is that we don't clip the signal anywhere.
It doesn't matter if our mix reaches minus six desibels or minus three desibels.
As long as it's peaking well bellow zero desibels, you should be safe.
So let's jump into it.
I'm going to try to make this as simple as possible.
Let's load a new project.
Select empty project here.
If you open a new project in FL Studio there will be a limiter on the master, which will
push up the levels.
And we don't want that.
Make sure there's no limiting on your master before you proceed!
Let's add a VST.
Route it to a mixer channel.
I'll just quickly add some chords so that we have something to play around with.
There are three main places to adjust the volume.
The mixer, the channel rack and in the synth itself.
A lot of people tend to forget about the levels in the synth.
As I said, It's important to reduce the volume at the source to avoid clipping, and
the synth is what's generating the sound.
If you're using a microphone or some other gear to record into FL Studio, then make sure
you're levels are healthy there as well.
Some professionals like to increase the volume in the channel rack all the way up to maximum
for all synths, and then just focus on the mixer and the synths themselves.
Note that samples should always be left at their default value.
It doesn't matter which way you do it with regard to the channel rack.
You can leave it at the default value, or set it to max.
It's up to you.
The most important thing is the source, which in this case is the synth itself, and the
signal level when it reaches the master.
Let's open massive.
Note that there's a master volume knob here.
Every synth should have a master output like this somewhere.
Watch what happens when I turn this up to far.
That's what clipping sounds like!
You can also visually see it here, and here, as well as here.
When it turns red, that's a really bad sign..
This is what we want to avoid at all cost.
It's possible to clip just a little bit, without even noticing it.
This effect is cumulative, meaning that the more elements you have in your mix, the worse
it will tend to get.
It's very important to make sure that we're not clipping anywhere.
The best way to make sure of that is to always turn down those knobs and faders, and always
mix low.
In other words: Gain staging.
I usually turn down the levels on every single element so that it's hitting around minus
fifteen decibels on the master.
It doesn't have to be exactly fifteen, anywhere from minus ten to minus eighteen decibels
will usually be fine.
By doing this, I know my input levels are good, and I can adjust the fader on the mixer
to get the mixing right afterwards, without having to worry about any potential clipping.
It's much better to prevent the clipping at the source right away, instead of than
trying to figure out what's causing the mix to sound bad later on.
If you want, you can load up a metering plugin on the master to make it easier to see what's
going on.
There's a lot of free plugins out there that will do the job nicely.
In this case I'm using Span, which is also a free plugin.
I'll add the link to the download page in the description bellow, so that you can head
over there and grab it if you want to.
Let's add another synth, and make some pads..
Do the same thing we did before.
Make sure the output volume in the vst does not clip by turning it down so that it reaches
minus fifteen decibels on the master.
It's a very dynamic sound, so you won't be able to hit EXACTLY minus fifteen.
This is close enough.
Again, It doesn't matter if you aim for minus fifteen or minus twelve.
The whole idea is to give ourselves a safety net to make sure we're not clipping.
Keep doing this for all your elements.
Every time you add a new synth, make sure you gain stage it.
The exception is of course samples and loops.
Those should be left at the default level in the channel rack.
We can adjust the levels for these in the mixer.
If you feel that the volume is way too low, just turn up your monitors.
Alternatively, you can put a limiter on the master in order to give yourself some volume,
but make sure that you place your metering plugin BEFORE the limiter on your master channel
if you choose to do this.
Remember to turn it off before rendering out the final mix for mastering, unless you intend
to do the mastering "in the mix".
That's it for the gain staging.
I could talk a lot more about this, but I'm trying to make it as short, straight to the
point and simple as possible here.
Make sure to watch the next video in this how to mix series, where I will be talking
about how to do the actual mixing.
By that, I mean getting every single element in your mix to sit right in relation to each
other.
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