DO THIS For The Cleanest Mixes Ever

Have you ever wondered why you don't manage to get clean mixes? Here's the solution! Do this for the cleanest mixes ever! ⏱️ Timestamps 0:00 Intro 0:06 DrumExperiments Theme 0:41 Introduction 0:52 Topic of the video: Gain Staging 1:11 Before going ahead, some questions for you 1:37 Back to Gain Staging 2:03 What is Clipping? 3:05 Let's make some examples: importing a drum loop 3:36 Analyzing the first imported loop's peak level 4:08 Adding shaker and tambourine loops 4:36 Drums + Shaker + Tambourine are almost clipping the master bus 5:18 Adding an EQ to the drum loop 6:04 The Pultec EQ clips both the drum loop track and the master bus 6:19 The solution 7:05 Evaluating the new peak level and preparing to EQ the drum loop 7:39 EQing the drum loop 8:40 Matching input and output gain on the drum loop's EQ 9:53 Considerations about matching input and output gain on plugins 10:13 Adding back the Shaker and Tambourine loops to the mix 10:59 EQing the Shaker loop 11:28 Considerations about the new master bus peak level 11:40 Summary about the importance of Gain Staging 12:22 Outro 🥁🪇 Download the free drums & percussions drum loops used in this video and many more: https://www.giovannimaucieri.altervis... 📝 Transcription/Summary Hello everyone! I’m Giovanni Maucieri, a professional drummer, music producer and audio engineer from Italy with over 20 years of experience in the industry. Today I want to talk about a very important topic, very often overlooked among modern music producers: gain staging. At the beginning of my career I made a lot of mistakes linked to this topic, so I decided to make this video in order to prevent you from making them as well. Before proceeding with the actual tutorial, let me ask you: do you know what the gain knobs on your audio interface do? Before you record, do you carefully set them to avoid digital clipping? Which maximum peak level do you reach on your DAW meter? Do you pay attention to the signal level in input and output on a plugin while mixing or mastering? Let me know in the comments. Now let’s go to the central topic of this video. What is gain staging? Gain staging is the correct audio signal levels management. Today the majority of us work in the digital domain and dealing with the correct audio signal levels is crucial in order to get the cleanest sound possible and avoiding clipping. In the analog days, clipping was more forgiving than it is in digital nowadays. But what is clipping? To explain it very quickly, it is what happens to a signal which goes over 0dBFS. The result is the truncation of the waveform and a very unpleasant distorted sound. I won’t go too deep with theorical notions in this video but let me know in the comments if you would like a more specific one about this. So, in the digital domain is important to avoid clipping at any stage of the production, from recording to mastering. It’s no coincidence that professional audio companies like SSL and Audient advice producers to stay between -20 and -10dBFS as maximum peak level when recording with their devices. In this video I want to discuss gain staging during the mixing process. For the examples I’m going to make, I’ll use some loops I made for my Drum Loops Database project (if you are searching for free drums, percussion, bass, piano, organ and synth loops, check the link in the description). Let’s import some of them and we immediately notice that they peak around -0.5dBFS. They are not clipping on their own, since they peak below the 0dBFS; their sum though, clips the master bus (as a side note, I choose to export my loops this way to give you an higher perceived loudness while you choose them, but they shouldn’t be used as they are level wise). Now let’s say I want to EQ, compress or add any effect to these loops. At the moment I can’t do it, since anything I would add would increase the gain of the loops and will clip the tracks in which I’ve loaded them. So, if I want to work on the volume relationship or add effects to them, I have to decrease the clip gain of my loops before, so I have enough headroom to process the sound and not clip both the single tracks and consequently the master bus. Of course, gain staging must be optimized also when sending a signal inside plugins, since if the level is too high, there is an high chance that the plugins will distort and ruin your sounds. So, in this case, the best practice would be, importing the loops, setting a lower clip gain and only then evaluating working on the tracks’ volume, inserting plugins, etc. 💻 Find me also on: My official website: https://www.giovannimaucieri.com Instagram:   / giomaucieri   X: https://x.com/giomaucieri Giò Maucieri Facebook Page:   / giomaucieri   DrumExperiments Facebook Page:   / drumexperiments   Fiverr.com: https://www.fiverr.com/giomaucieri #Recording #Mixing #Mastering #GainStaging #DAW #Clipping