SwitchBack wrote

is this a question without a straight answer or something?

Yummy!

I think what Switchback is saying is it is a complex subject and there are many views on it. A can of worms as they say.

Many of the concepts from analog days can be applied in our modern digital world especially with the use of VU meters. We don't have to record hot at all now so that is all a myth. With 24 bit resolutions one can record at lower volumes on the tracks a little.

Your master fader should be at unity and stay there. Your buss faders can be at unity or very close to. Basically you should really never see a red clip light. When tracks and buses are also at a constant ref level, plugins will love you for it too. It ensures they are all working right in their sweet spot too.

Signals have two components to their level, peak and rms levels. I like keeping all my tracks at a consistent rms level. (easy to achieve at the tracking stage) It makes for a much easier mix later on. Buses can end up at the same rms ref level and so can the master with a little care. This practice goes a long way to achieving a great sound mix.

Analog qualities can be added in everywhere now with a range of plugins designed to do so. So it is also possible to get very warm and fat sounding digital mixes. Studio One's amazing CTC-1 Mix processor goes a long way towards this. There are some great tape simulators now too which give you the options of applying that sound over parts of your digital mix rather than all of it. This is actually better.

Attached is an article I wrote a while ago on gain staging. Have a read and see if you can get some ideas from it.

Hi Brandon,
Gain staging is still relatively simple now, as back as you were used to, so while it's good to keep an eye on levels,
And gain (as you are inquiring), just keep to good practices. Bandwidth and resolution are so high in quality today, so you really are working with better quality now.

That said, you can probably guess the rest is the use of other equipment, recording practices, microohones, and so forth. So look at those items as well.

There's good help in this forum, by people as yourself looking for the best quality they can muster. So ask good solid descriptive questions, and you will get good solid answers.

Lastly, if I may suggest, avoid any non descriptive terms (as fun as they might sometimes be), and try to resolve specific needs.

As to why you are seeing the master outs peaking, yet track levels look Ok, then there are a few things that can cause that. Such as accumulation of several tracks causing the master out to clip. Same moments where the tracks accumulate same frequencies often low, or transients that happen together, will look fine on their own track, yet overload at the master when joined, grouped, or bussed. Also, effect sends can contribute to output levels so always think in terms of the sum of those parts. Have a look at each track, and see if any very low frequencies are occurring. Trim them back, with subtle EQ, or low pass filtering, while watching the master out.

Lastly, if you are hearing the mix and it is good to your ears, you should get that same result, from your final mix.
If that mix is played somewhere else, and sounds less than expected, you'll have to address that towards that topic in itself. So being descriptive is important as it should be.

So a lot can happen bud, and not due to the product is less then what you were use to, but highly likely, it's more than what you were use to. With the right care, you can get super quality results.

So give us further details, about what not so good on the main outs, Master, etc.

Need more meat & potatoes, and less anchovies. Oh wait, rather less worms.

brandonabney wroteis this a question without a straight answer or something?

Yeah, sorry man, I couldn't resist.

Digital gain staging is one of the most hotly debated subjects in audio forums. Apart from all other things that changed for you in the last 10-15 years, like you hearing (more trained but probably also losing a bit of high end) and your taste of music, digital audio has become factors upon factors more complex under the hood. And all that complexity paradoxically makes people want to hear simple explanations of how it all works. There are no such shortcuts. You're left with two options: hard study or faith.

Leaves the quality question: "Why doesn't it sound as good as it used to?". To keep it simple I suggest that it probably will sound great in 10-15 years.

[/philosophical monologue after a few beers ]

"As to why you are seeing the master outs peaking, yet track levels look Ok, then there are a few things that can cause that. Such as accumulation of several tracks causing the master out to clip. Same moments where the tracks accumulate same frequencies often low, or transients that happen together, will look fine on their own track, yet overload at the master when joined, grouped, or bussed."

I know this is why it's happening. I just wanted to know what the best solution is for it.


"Your master fader should be at unity and stay there."

Thank you, that was the answer I was looking for. So I should lower track volumes insted of reaching for the master. Ok.


"So a lot can happen bud, and not due to the product is less then what you were use to, but highly likely, it's more than what you were use to. With the right care, you can get super quality results."

Yeah,lol. I know everything is better now. Thats why I just don't get whats up. But I think What you said about my ears being older holds alot of water.



Thanks, everyone

If the master fader should always be at unity then there would be no need for a master fader...

If you use plugins in your master bus then your whole mix would change if you changed the levels using your channel faders. A simple true-peak limiter could all be what the doctor would recommend.

You need to remember one thing - In a modern daw nothing will ever clip! It has practically unlimited headroom. The clip light only indicates that whenever your signal leaves the daw it will clip.

Btw, many vintage plugins are calibrated to use -18dBFS as the 0dBvu reference level.

brandonabney wrote"Your master fader should be at unity and stay there."

Thank you, that was the answer I was looking for. So I should lower track volumes insted of reaching for the master. Ok.

Just because modern DAW's can handle a huge range levels, it also does not stop you from working within a prescribed range of levels either. e.g. tracks, buses and your main buss all being at the same rms ref level. It is pretty easy to achieve especially if we are tracking right through to the final mix.

When you do this you will find:

Groups of tracks are often sent to a buss and for the buss final level to be at a ref level then the tracks only are usually a few db down from unity in order to achieve it.

Buses feed the main buss and often it is very easy to end up with your mix as well being at the ref level with very little manoeuvring of buss levels.

Although my master might be at unity most of the time if I end up with a mix that is falling say 1 dB shy of 0 dB VU or going over consistently by 1 or 2 dB VU then it can easily be rectified with some slight changes to the master fader. But mostly with care you can arrive at a perfect ref level with the final mix with the master fader at unity.

In my article on gain staging I mention the Klanghelm meter being good ballistics wise. It was then but right now the Waves VU has an even closer ballistic to the real thing. It is interesting though that none of them can get it perfect. I think the way a needle actually moves is not easy to emulate but Waves have done a fine job of it though.

Digital sound fantastic NOW! folks. As someone who has come from the 70's right through to the current day all I can say is things have never sounded better to me right now. No noise, distortion or wow and flutter. Amazing stuff. We are living in an age of incredible sounding converters too. (and studio monitors as well!) Drums have never sounded as close to the live sound as they do now also. Tape always softened the sound of drums.

No need to wait 15 years for digital to sound good. Ask some heavy weights such as Andrew Scheps how they feel about current digital standards and they will all agree right now it is sounding pretty darn incredible. If you cannot get digital to sound good the problem lies with you, not the medium.

As Jemusic mentions, watch unity. And not just at the Master track. You will be adjusting channel faders throughout your mix. No problem. However, once any channel basically passes unity (or level indicators peak beforehand,), you need to adjust that channels gain control. Too high a gain can happen due to a number of things. One is initial recording input was too hot, so while it may have been below +0 digitally (avoiding a harsh distortion), raising that gain elsewhere will easily max the signal, likely from any number of things like boosting EQ, or expanding too hot. Better to record a few dB's down (see Jemusic's gain information, or any Web related info on the topic of proper gain staging).

Another way to unknowingly alter.gain is by adjusting the amplitude grips in an audio event (the grip at top center). If your channel fader is too hot (anywhere above unity), you'll need to bring down the audio level at that grip, or if it is a MIDI instrument, at its main output level.

Good practices, such as EQ'ing to reduce level, and avoid boosting bands when possible. Watch effect levels at their outputs. Avoid bouncing with the gain too low, then raising it as you then have squashed the headroom, while also raising the noise floor, etc. etc.
There's a million stories in the naked city.

Learn what works, and doesn't, so if you're experiencing something of less quality (and you are, which is actually a good thing), look at those causes. Poor audio result is not due to this DAW, nor any other competing DAW today that's relevant. Unfortunately with such complexity, the devil is in the details.

Can of worms indeed. Any idea that the master fader must remain at unity, in analog or digital, is a myth that defies all attempts to kill it.

It's supernatural like Freddie Kruger.

Never heard "must" anywhere, but yeah there are those sites, where that term is used quite a lot.

I hear, (psst, you didn't get if from me), if anyone ever moves a master fader too high, it will explode!

It's all just a pigment of our amalgamation.

Let me try to give a real answer based on my understanding of things after 20 years of this as a hobby:

1. When it comes to your mix, these days, yes, you can drop your master fader. Audio is being processed at such high bit-depths within your DAW, that the headroom behind the scenes is huge. Dropping the master fader will not decrease audio quality or add noise to the signal or anything. Now, that's just "within the DAW." That doesn't take into account when....

2. ...you start dealing with analog modeling plugins. These things are designed to operate within certain ranges. If you tracked too loudly and added one of these, you could be overdriving the plugin (more harmonics/distortion), creating aliasing, screw with the phase, etc. If your plugin is more "digital" by design and built to be clean as a whistle, this is kind of a non-issue as the plugin should also have a ton of internal headroom. Just make sure the output of the plugin isn't clipping and you should still be good. But if you're using analog modeling plugins, how hard you hit their inputs and outputs can be a big deal. Some analog modeling plugins will offer clean inputs and outputs (Kush does this on their transformer plugins for instance), but if not, you can use a clean, "digital" trim plugin to always adjust the gain on the way in or way out of any analog modeling plugins without doing any harm. So let's say you're sticking with digital-type plugins, then you really don't need to worry about this stuff. But then there is...

3. ...the hardware itself. My understanding is that converters are spec'd out at certain reference levels, so if you're recording audio, or going through any kind of A/D stage, there's probably an ideal target level on your hardware where things will sound "best" or at least where the converter will perform exactly as spec'd. Hit the converter too hard and things might sound a little different. You should have a wide sweet spot on any modern converter, so my recommendation is don't clip and leave your peaks plenty of headroom on the way in.

I don't think any of the above is too controversial. I'm sure there's stuff that can be nitpicked, or someone might want to discuss summing, quantization noise, or rounding errors, but I really wouldn't worry about that stuff. The biggest complication in modern DAWs are really the plugins and what they're doing to the signal. Other than that, if you keep your levels healthy but you still find a stray peak in your mix, just drop the master fader. Nothing bad will happen other than you'll have brought some headroom back into the signal.

Any fader at unity seems to offer a nice combination of the range above and below that point. It is not a matter of quality as people are saying here, but more of a range factor. e.g. nice amount of gain above unity plus a healthy range of control below that point e.g. fading nicely to fully off. Having faders at other points just won't give you the same quality of range control. Especially using something like Faderport. Around unity you will always have the best amount of fine control as well e.g. very small changes.

A master fader well below unity also suggests that the levels that are preceding it maybe a little high. Not great for any plugins that may also be preceding it too. It implies buss levels may be high and event levels on the tracks themselves may also be high, not the best situation either.

Master faders at unity tend to keep the levels preceding it at lower levels. Better to have all levels in your DAW system little lower and have the monitoring level in your studio a little higher instead.

Jemusic gets it pretty right but I will also add that I don't understand the "just put a limiter on the master bus and call it good" mindset.

Limiters lop-off the top of all your transients, which changes the waveform of the audio you understand and lowers the overall dynamic range of your mix. Your peaking master bus may also be caused by runaway low frequencies. Using proper gain-staging and high-pass filtering as the first steps of your mixing stage (or as you go if you are in a home-project scenario) would prevent the need to ever use a limiter on your master bus.

You can wait and just put a band-aid on everything or you can never get a cut to begin with... that's the way I look at it.

In my mind there is really never any reason to use one on a mix. Anything a limiter is trying to fix can be fixed another way that does not change so drastically the shape of the waveform. It's like using a sledgehammer to put in a tiny finishing nail.

Quality is being conveyed due to the OP where there's a concern about quality of their recording.

I think most here are saying the same thing, that it's a matter of watching unity as a guideline which is really pretty understood.

Internal processing is 32 bit floating point. So bit depth is quite healthy.

Just good practices to watch for.

I usually stay away from gain stage conversation.
The flexibility of dB's can be so forgiving, I prefer to not worry too much about it. As mentioned, there's a lot more to keeping to good practices for quality recordings.

I don't know, do I add how long I've been in the business, next. Lol.

Cheers.

P.s. just saw darrenporters point about limiters not necessary in a mix. Absolutely. They serve well for mastering. I see no point of ever needing one in a mix. A live shows sure. They serve as protection. For a mix in a song? No, they're limiting

Have fun all, and enjoy your Sunday / Sonntag.

I think in my article on gain staging my use of a limiter was more set it so the threshold and output ceiling is something like -0.5 dB. Then the limiter will do nothing to transients or the mix. Only stop any rogue peaks from going over -0.5. (I might amend my article to explain that) But I agree with Darren overall though in that with care you rarely need them. In mastering a mix for export this is especially important. We all know there is no clipping taking place within the DAW but stopping a mix from ever going over -0.5 dB will ensure when the mix leaves the DAW, no clipping will ever take place in the converters being used in playback. That is where I am referring. Some cheaper converters in playback will actually sound quite bad if a mix is set to reach say -0.2 or -0.3 dB.

Limiters are handy in mastering also where the overall rms level of a mix needs to be increased. (usually for client putting pressure on one to do so) and PSP Xenon does it way better than most too. People are also forgetting a high end limiter such as Xenon set for a threshold and ceiling of -0.5 or adding rms level is also not going to do anything to a mix either.

Before I convert any mix to an MP3 file I often limit the final mix to a further -1 dB as well. MP3 conversion can sometimes create peaks over 0 dB FS.

brandonabney wroteSo when I am mixing, lets say none of my individual track faders are clipping but the master is.... Is there a difference between lowering and re-balancing all the tracks, and simply lowering the master fader?

To answer the OP's simple question above: Technically speaking, "perhaps", because if you use mix busses / mix groups, doing the former may change the levels into gain dependent downstream plugins on busses and slightly alter the mix while doing the latter only changes the amplitude of the main output.

In that light, dropping the master by a couple of db to not clip a converter on an otherwise good mix perfectly preserves the current mix balance.

Can of worms? Yep. Look where this thread landed after that really basic question.