What Is Gain Staging? How to Gain Stage Your Mix

Gain staging is an important part of getting professional-sounding mixes. In this video, follow along as Sam Loose shares what gain staging is, the origins of gain staging, and how to use gain staging to your advantage in music production and audio mixing in order to avoid audio clipping and to keep excess noise to a minimum.


Chapters:
0:00 Intro
0:45 What is gain staging
3:33 History of gain staging
4:23 Digital vs. analog clipping
6:22 Dynamic range in modern digital systems
7:43 Gain staging in a multitrack session
9:55 Why gain staging is important
11:13 Tips for great gain staging
12:25 Outro

#izotope #mixing #gainstaging
SYND ID: MB01NCYGXNVKYWO

[Aightherewego]

Needed this video when i first started. I think it's a beginner's must watch

[dprokramaz]

There's a tremendous amount of videos providing great technical advice on how to "professionally master" music, and the "sweetspot" of gain and keeping the audio from "clipping" and distortion, etc. However, I downloaded a bunch of top selling songs from the artists' own YouTube channels and placed them in my DAW and guess what? All the audio tracks from these "top musicians" clipped like crazy — The VU meter literally lived in the red zone. This was especially true for rap, pop, dance music, etc. Moral of the story?: Top artists break music production "rules" whenever they see fit which is often.

[G_handle]

iZotope! Can I request that you do a Gain Staging Part 2, deep dive reference video in which you lay out the differences between Peak & RMS, how 0dB VU is referenced, -18dbFS RMS, 1.23v, +4dBU, what Nominal levels are, Noise Floor to Nominal vs Nominal to Distortion, Headroom, Dynamic Range, Signal to Noise Ratio, THD (Total Harmonic Distortion).

Essentially EXPAND upon what you just did, but more as a Reference Material that everyone can point to and come back to for the definitive explanation of these fundamental audio engineering concepts.

You could also expand upon (with visuals) what digital clipping vs analog clipping looks and sounds like, but also include the point in every circuit, or code where a signal goes from linear to non-linear, and how different circuits distort the signal differently. What do those distortions look and sound like? Even order. Odd harmonics. Etc

Sam made reference to the fact that many people get Gain Staging confused. I would argue that if someone where to search YouTube and watch the dozens of GS videos, they'd be applauded for Not coming away confused.
Hence my humble request.

Settle this once and for all!

[Yourmom-blyx]

One of the best explained gain staging videos I have seen… awesome job!

[Harrysound]

This video is fantastic. I know a lot of this stuff but I often watch these videos to gain that little bit extra understanding and to keep fresh. This was expertly done.

[distillednoise]

Finally a clear video about gain staging which classifies as crap all the other videos about this topic.

[FukumanDJ]

Another Sam's Big-masterclass! You rule Sam!

[davidmultimedia]

I’m glad to confirm i’ve been doing it right all these years! 😅 Excellent video! Couldn’t be clearer! It will definitely help A LOT of people out there!

[nullnull]

Thanks Sam! Excellent breakdown on gain staging.

[jeremythornton]

When it comes to EQing, I tend to prefer to cut as opposed to add. I can always bring the level up for the whole sound after I have cut. This is the way old passive EQs worked and I like it.

[failsaferecords]

you make it all sound fun and interesting. I grasped all this stuff a while ago, but I'll be sending this link to a few of the sound recordists who fire me sessions to mix. This is a 10 min life saver for them, and for me having to deal with their recordings

[mohammadtahir]

All my mixing issues were mentioned in this video and also clearly explained. This video is amazing.🧡

[theinfochannel]

Thanks to you I now understand what Gain Staging is and how to excite it. THANK YOU SO MUCH Your a GREAT Teacher.

[JimReuterskiold]

A very clear explanation of gain staging. I appreciate the way you define terms; sometimes the jargon and terminology gets past me. Thanks, this channel is going into my arsenal.

[bassManDavis]

Fantastic Sam! Got it and all thanks to your very interesting and valuable presentation! Can’t wait to try it out!

[popolokross]

you are the first to finally made it clear for me. Thank you, i hope for your continued success

[davidbasscooper]

this video made it clearer and easy to understand. great video

[CarlitoProductions]

Glad I watched this. Ive been struggling to understand if I always needed to have faders at a specific level and I wasnt clear on the term itself. This was super informative. Thank you for this!

[marcellob.]

Finally, a great explanation, thanks Sam and iZotope!

[kinggizzard]

Wow! Great video explaining quite a lot of key concepts that are easy to grasp for beginners. Thank you!

Edit: Better to use the term bit depth rather than bit rate