5/19/2023 0 Comments Ice9 automuteIt's just easier not to miss this way, but since music is about a lot more things than perceived loudness (see "loudness wars" for everyone interested), I don't think the bang for your buck ratio looks good on this. If I don't know how to distribute my instruments and do my mix to get a decent level of LUFS out at the mastering stage, then a plugin right from the start can "help", because I start to tweak everything right from the beginning as much as possible to end up with as much loudness as possible. Regarding the EDM example: To me this looks like a trial & error approach. I see, you've copied & pasted Izotopes definition of gain staging from their article, but if you would've actually read that article too ( ) you wouldn't make the claim that it has nothing to do with how much space there is. I think it drags the attention away from truly understanding and learning about the things we do while we compose music. I've never been a fan of these " use THIS simple trick to make your music more exiting" kind of tips, especially if they get into the way of other important elements. There's imo just too many downsides that come along with not being in full control over the gain staging. If I don't know how to distribute my instruments and do my mix to get a decent level of LUFS out at the mastering stage, then a limiter right from the start can "help", because I start to tweak everything right from the beginning in a fashion that leads anyhow to a decent loudness. One can just mix at lower levels and bump up the speakers occasionally when really needed, that's a way cleaner way to mix and it saves a lot of uneccessary extra work. The decisions we make matter they affect not only the complete dynamic range, they also affect the dynamic range between fewer instruments, which plays an important rule too when it comes to the mastering session and maximizing LUFS.Īnd again, we can't make these decisions if all our instruments get boosted into sky all the time. It's also about the perceived loudness of the final track. Gain staging isn't only about taking care of the volume meters not clipping. The volume distribution together with some other elements also determine a big part of the perceived loudness, which leads me to. One could put hours into fine-tuning all these elements only to figure that it doesn't work out as soon as the limiter is being dropped.Īnd it's not only that. You could argue with " I'll catch up on that in the end", but that makes life again only more difficult than it must be, because many decisions like the range of instrumental distribution, the usage of particular instruments at all, EQing and also adding plugins to single instruments depend largely on the avaiable space for each instrument in context to the composition. And you can't do proper gain staging if you start to work right away from the very beginning with a limiter on the master bus that pushes all instruments to their limits. Gain staging ensures that all of your instruments have room to breathe and that all of them together, the final signal on the master channel, don't cause any kind of distortion and clipping after exporting. So yes, it is about space - and how much it is about space! It is about using the avaiable space (volume) to distribute your instruments in the best possible balance. There can't be infinite instruments peaking at 0dB without your outcome becoming distorted and muddy. When you export in the end, you definitely have an audio budget. This means, you'll have to do proper gain staging no matter if you temporarily make use of the benefits of floating-point processing and smash your volume bars into infinity without causing instant distortion.
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