Let’s talk about something very foundational: Gain staging.
Why is it so important?
Imagine you’re making a smoothie. You’ve got all your ingredients ready to go in the blender.
You spin it.
But you made one crucial mistake:
You forgot to put on the lid.
Oops.
Gain staging is for your mix what that lid is for your blender.
Without a proper gain staging practice it is difficult to control your mix. Things are going to shoot up all over the place.
You have good intentions and maybe even great ingredients, but you end up with a frustrating mess.
I’ve been there! For a long time gain staging was the missing link for me. Of course I didn’t realise it at the time. Once I started applying it, a lot of things got easier.
But let’s back up a bit.
What do I mean by “gain staging”?
Gain staging is the process of staying aware of and being in control of how loud the different parts of the signal are throughout your entire music making process.
It involves things like recording at a good level, maintaining consistent gain when going in and out of your plugins, achieving good fader resolution, hitting your bus processing, analog chain or analog modelled plugins at an optimal level, and so on.
Contrary to popular belief, it’s not something you only do once at the beginning of the project. It’s important to start off well, but it’s an ongoing process.
What are the benefits?
Adopting a good gain staging practice provides consistency and repeatability in your work. It allows you to remain more objective and trust your decisions.
It can help you better stay in control of the whole process, enabling you to work quicker and finish more of what you start.
Because you’re not getting bogged down so much, it allows you to focus more on the creative side of things and stay in a flow state.
It provides a solid foundation to build your mix and improve your skills.
There is no one right way to do gain staging. What’s matters is finding a way that works for you.
I’ve spent many years trying different methods and tweaking my approach.
Here’s what I think many people get wrong:
They think gain staging is about developing an elaborate system of rules and mathematics to live by religiously.
I don’t think so.
Gain staging is supposed to make things easier for you. Not harder!
Of course, there’s an initial learning curve like with any other skill. But it doesn’t have to be difficult.
My approach these days is simple and straightforward and I don’t really have to think about it much. It’s a natural part of my workflow.
There’s only so much I can cover in one email, but I recently did a 30+ minute video about gain staging in Patreon .
In that video I go through what gain staging means to me, what things exactly it entails and why, and I also show different ways of how to approach it in practice in the DAW.
You can use my approach as a starting point for your own exploration if you want. As I said it’s the result of many years of trying different methods and seeing what works for me.
Click here to watch the video: Introduction to gain staging
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