Hey Stephen 🙂
Gain staging is a hot topic in the music production world.. often with an aggressive tone regarding best practices.
It’s important to understand a bit of history by taking a step back and understanding how the audio world used to work (only analog), and how it’s evolved today (a lot of digital).
Analog Audio Hardware:
Analog hardware always introduces noise into the audio signal, so it’s all about setting the initial level at a solid level where you don’t risk distortion, yet you’re not too quiet and your audio gets buried in the audio equipment’s self-noise.
That’s the first step.
Next, is when we start working with audio processing equipment like EQ’s, Compressors, and other various music production effects.
As our audio goes into each of these audio processors, we risk distortion if audio is too loud, and if audio is too quiet, we again can suffer from too much noise in the audio signal.
As your audio goes through each audio processor, you can now understand that audio equipment noise gets introduced at each step of the audio signal chain.
If your audio is too low, you’ll start introducing noticeable noise compared to the initial recording. If audio is too loud, you risk distortion at that point of the audio chain, too.
Digital Audio World (VSTs):
In the digital world, this is no longer a problem for typical plugins.. but let’s first break it down.
Some digital audio plugins try to replicate the analog sound, so gain staging is still very important in these cases for the signal-to-noise ratio.
However, some digital plugins do not introduce self-noise due to physical components like capacitors, inductors, and other electrical components.
So to answer your question about how to gain stage in FL Studio.
Best practice is to make sure the volume going into each plugin is not distorting. You’ll find that a lot of digital plugins can go way past 0dB, and still not distort!
If you’re using plugins that emulate analog music hardware, they will definitely distort, and may even have the self-noise, so if you send audio too quiet to multiple effects, the equipment noise can quickly become noticeable and degrade the quality of the audio signal’s high-quality sound.
Now.. pushing things hard to distort isn’t bad; it can be an effect, but it’s important to know it’s a choice in each case.
I would say it sounds like you’re a bit overwhelmed and possibly trying to learn a topic a bit advanced from your skill level right now.
I tell students that first you need to learn to make a beat & how your DAW works.
Over time, you will start to improve with your song arrangement and mixing & mastering.
Finally, you’ll start to see improvement, and begin achieving a more professional sound, while gaining knowledge & confidence as you go along.
The music production world is full of so much information. Each stage of the music production process requires a totally different skillset (the beatmaking, arrangement, mixing, & mastering).
While making a beat, I’m solely focused on making the melodies & drum loop. That is the base of everything.
If you’re a producer doing everything, I find the arrangement, mixing & mastering all kind of work off each other.
As you start arranging the song, you’ll find weak areas of a song, which your mixing & mastering will improve / enhance.
The plugins you’ve mentioned are typically helpful in the mastering stages to see the frequency balance of a song, or to see the average loudness of the song.
Don’t worry about trying to adjust exact values, producing music doesn’t work that way.
While it’s very important to understand gain staging, I find there can be too much focus on it.
Now you know that gain staging is very important at certain times, but in our DAWs, a lot of the time it can be irrelevant due to 32-Bit floating point & plugins not introducing noise.
(Try this example: Open a digital EQ, boost the volume very loud into the EQ. Now take another gain plugin and reduce the volume by the amount you just boosted it up. You should hear no distortion, and the audio will be the same).
If you were to try that example in the analog world, the audio would have been distorted on initial audio boost into the hardware EQ.
But since digital audio often does not play by the same rules, the myths of gain staging cloud the end goal.. which is having fun making music and getting good results 🙂
To do that, find the plugins you like to use, understand how to create powerful beats, and you’ll be on your way!
If you want step-by-step beatmaking training, please look at my Course Pathways.
If you are a member, Course Pathways will guide you through the whole music production process, from a music producer’s point of view using FL Studio.
Let me know if you are still confused about gain staging in the world of music production!
