Hello everyone and welcome to the first blog in 2021.
First of all, I want to wish you a very very happy new year and I wish you nothing less than I would wish for my self. As we all realised in 2020, good health is the most important thing of all and therefore I wish to all of you good health. May your dreams come true and let's hope that we will be back on the dancefloors all over the globe this year.
Now let's back to some learning :)
"Gain Staging" - In music production there are several technical processes that people take a bit more seriously than needed, and one of those processes is Gain Staging.
I will not write the definition of the Gain Staging and it's characteristics because the internet is already filled with information of this kind, so I will just post a link with a great explanation where you can read all necessary information about this topic.
READ: SWEETWATER GAIN STAGING
From the link above you could read all technical information about gain staging. What is missing from the blogs and texts on the internet is how should we use this and how this could help us to get better sound in our production. Gain staging is nothing more than a process that will help us to protect our sounds of not getting destroyed by clipping.
There are some types of hardware/plugins that will change how they work by changing the input gain (more gain you put on distortion input, more it will distort - more gain you put on compressor input, more it will compress, while many other types of plugins, Input gain will not affect of the process (if not clipping).
So we are coming to the conclusion that Gain is really important while we use Dynamic Plugins (distortion, compressors, limiters....)
If you use hardware gear than gain staging is a bit more important when comparing to the ITB (In The Box) production, and that's because input gain is really important to some of the analogue components. By increasing the gain we are increasing the amount of electricity inside that component and some of the components will change their sound by different gain levels.
When it comes to my personal production, I follow only a few steps in order to make a safe channel signal process and how do I approach the Gain staging you can see in the video below.