Gain Structure

[CrimsnSyrn]

Agreed, Thank you Rob for asking this question!

I have always wondered this same thing, and knew I was lacking tons of knowledge in this department, and have always wanted to pose the question correctly.

A wealth of information again from Andy and Russell.

Thank you so much for your generousity!

[playagibson]

Gain staging is essential when your using plugins such as Slate VCC
You need headroom or the mixes will lack depth.
It's a good habit to get into.

[Russell Landwehr]

Yes, Andy. I wasn't considering that a track may need to be mastered by someone else later. But wouldn't a track with -.5 peaks just be turned down at the input of an EQ before twiddling knobs?

Also you made a good point there about overs. They aren't so bad in a hot mix but you sure don't want them in an intimate guitar vocal song!

Interesting idea on the normalizing experiment. I'm gonna try that to see if I need to throw away my aversion to normalization.

Russell

[andygabrys]

wouldn't a track with -.5 peaks just be turned down at the input of an EQ before twiddling knobs?

well practically yes. and just like you might add gain in mastering to get it hot, you can turn it down at any time.

but getting back to the whole point of Ronan's advice and the original post........

its about getting the levels right from the start, so you don't have to turn stuff down, and you don't have to turn much stuff up right?

So if individual tracks might be -10 or -15. the mix buss might be -5 or -3db once all processing and mixing happens on the tracks. then you have acceptable headroom for mastering, and you don't have to add too much gain in mastering, which might accentuate noise depending on how everything was recorded.

or thats my story anyways

[Russell Landwehr]

Nice way to bring it back around!

BTW, I just checked out your links to normalization... it appears my assumptions on how it works were wrong... I guess normalization is back in my tool box.

[CrimsnSyrn]

Whoops, forgot to mention Magne in my thank you, post!

Was just looking what I had copied from your post, and realized I forgot to thank you, too!

[Kolstad]

Whoops, forgot to mention Magne in my thank you, post!

Was just looking what I had copied from your post, and realized I forgot to thank you, too!

Nice of you Juliet, but no need. Posting about things like this is making me learn me as much as anyone reading it. The act of writing is really helpful to clear my own thoughts on the subject. So once I read Andy's and Russel's posts, I went back an edited some bad formulations of mine.

It seems there's some variation on how narrow and wide "normalization" should be defined, and there are also different types. I like concepts to be narrow, as they tend to be used more sparse that way, and mean more. But in the digital daw environment, normalization (in the wide definition of turning audio up and down) a fairly forgiving process, as you get so many monitor options before you really have to commit to anything. So a wider definition makes more sense, as there is also a lot of good uses for normalization.

[Paulie]

Yet another thread showing me how little I know and how far I gave to go.

[Russell Landwehr]

Holy Cow! Was this thread really from a year-and-a-half ago?? Time flies!

[wen]

Just poking around... thanks for the conversation all!

Let's see if I'm getting up to speed.

First, the concept of "summing" - this explains how individual tracks that don't clip on playback can clip when they are all played back all at once when mixing the cue. Hence the need to record things between -10 or even -15, to keep the end result from getting too loud.

Then, the difference between analog and digital. That is to say, when recording with a DAW you never want to go over 0 or you will lose data, whereas recording in the red with analog was a lot more forgiving. I still try to get the hottest, CLEANEST signal I can going in, which for me and the harp is around -10, -8 or -6, and I don't end up with a lot of tracks usually so I do tend to try for the hotter level so I can boost it more cleanly later if needed and end up around -2 db. If more headroom is needed later one could normalize down.

Once the signal has been converted to digital and you are MIXING individual tracks, tracks can go way over 0, up to 10 or 12 even, because the tracks have headroom because of the bitdepth. [I forget precisely why this is.]

A bit uncertain regarding putting a compressor/limiter on a master bus that is going over 0, and end up with output between 0 and -5 as I think Russell says he does.

I thought the master bus had to be under 0.

But I guess that the master bus also has about 12 db of headroom?? So you could still compress/limit a master bus that was +5 and end up at -5 and so not get distortion when going to a file.

Anyway, I still have 'analog memory' so until recently I had no idea you could put the faders above 0 to mix until recently.