Why I Don’t Do “Gainstaging” (and what I do instead)

winning staging has become something of a catchphrase on the web when it comes to mixing today we're going to talk about

what

it is,

what

it isn't, why I don't do it and the process that I think works best, you can have all the free process, just go to Recordingrevolution.com, five step mixing, So what is gain staging? It can mean a lot of things at its simplest level, it just means setting levels to get the right volumes, but people take it much further. In a sense, when you think about gain staging, it could be as simple as when I turn a compressor on and off, the overall volume of the track stays more or less the same, so it's not much louder or much louder. silent when I turn on that compressor.

That's one form I would call gain staging, but there's another part that I would say is unnecessarily complicated and that is taking all the tracks in your mix and bringing them up to a certain measurable volume level so you can systematize the I guess the process and some of it comes from this idea of ​​analog recording equipment where we have a lot of channel plug-ins that are modeled after classic analog hardware and the argument is that those pieces of hardware were really designed to receive a signal at a certain level within a certain range to make it sound better okay but I think there are some problems so the basic idea is this and I know this because I get these questions frequently and I wonder where people get this idea from and the idea.

It's uh, I'm going to take all my tracks in my mix and I'm going to normalize them to a certain maximum level, so I have minus 18 or minus 12 or something like that and I take everything in my session, whether it's 10 tracks or 100 tracks. and I run a process to make sure all levels are the same and this is the first thing I would say about all levels and all tracks are not created equal, they are not all supposed to be the same, let's take a traditional approach . rock song drums bass guitars vocals Keys percussion the only track on the Shaker should be the same volume as the snare and the vocals shouldn't, that's funny, that's another problem I hear a lot in mixes, people make the Shaker incredibly loud for some reason uh no Shaker needs to be back in the mix and in its proper place, it doesn't need to be at the same level, so I think that while this approach is probably well-intentioned and maybe works for some people, I find it unnecessarily complicated. and even harmful to people who are trying to learn how to mix.

If you are a professional and like to be Tweaky with this stuff, this video is not for you if you are struggling to get a mix to sound good, throw all this out. game staging because what ends up happening is you start doing a lot of math and not a lot of music, you start thinking in terms of luft values ​​and you normalize to a certain database and make sure everything is in its perfect place and what I found. They are people obsessed with those things, their mixes sound terrible, they are so obsessed with them that they think that the cure for their bad mixes is some magic formula to set the levels that will make the end result amazing and that is not what sets the levels. levels.

Importantly, I'm not saying we shouldn't set levels, but trying to turn it into some kind of formula that will magically produce great results is a silly task, and from a practical point of view, if I have a mix with five tracks and then a mix with a hundred tracks and I have a process to set them all to the same level. Well, five tracks at a level will go up to a certain volume, but a hundred tracks at that same level will go up to an even higher volume, so there's really no way for that formula to work unless you have the same number of tracks each time, so here you have a better option.

Here is my rebuttal to this type of gain staging fad and it is what I call step two in my five step mix. process and it's just static mixing, all it takes is giving yourself a moment, a few moments to just work with the levels and panning of your tracks before you get to all those fun, fancy plug-ins that you love so much and take the time to getting the right balance between the tracks balance does not mean they are all at the same level balance means they are all at the appropriate level as if I were singing in a choir and singing a tenor part and Singing so loud that everyone can clearly hear my voice above the others.

I'm the problem. I need to lower the volume. I don't need any cool new singing techniques. I just need to sing lower. That's what we do when we are. By balancing tracks in the static mix we're saying okay, you guys are a little too loud, you're a little too quiet, you need to be here, you need to be here, um, okay, now who's who isn't being heard or who? listen too much, the problem is that a lot of people jump right into equalizers and compressors and, you know, take tape overdrive and all this other fun, good stuff in the tracks before they get the levels right, how can you expect to get some kind of a good compressor setup when the levels feeding it are not balanced, who cares if you have the perfect compressor setup in your box?

If the overall snare is too quiet in the mix, you're literally spinning, not literally, but you're spinning your wheels and you're literally taking more time to mix the song and work on things you can't hear in the mix. A better solution is to simply use a little restraint and wait to put those plugins in there until you've put in the time. make it sound as good as possible without any plugins and guess what happens. I've seen this time and time again, people who, for example, have gone through my mixing course, say that when they finally get this static mix and they actually try it.

I'm impressed by how good they can make it sound with just levels and panning and then B how easy the rest of the process is because everything starts from a good place, a nice balanced place, the rest of the mix becomes much easier . if you want to try my mixing process and it's something that you can try and you can determine if it works or not, it will work, you can get it for free, it's a five step guide, it's just a couple of pages, it won't take you long to read the whole thing. , change your paradigm of how you mix, change that process and just watch what happens, it will be a lot of fun, you can have it for free, just go to Recordingrevolution.com, mix in five steps, thank you. to see the happy mix