Common advice is to “gain stage” your tracks by calibrating them to -18. People often leave out whether they mean -18 dBFS or -18 dBVU, both of which would yield vastly different levels depending on the source material. But why choose a calibration point to begin with? Here’s Matthew Weiss from The Pro Audio Files describing the differences between VU … Read More
Why I use Expanders on DI’s.
Picture 1. In the first picture, you’ll see 4 colored bands on the analyzer. The red band is the noise floor of my interface, and it’s reading down around -110dbfs. The dark orange band at the very bottom is where the expander is pushing that noise floor to, down around -170dbfs. I usually use HoRNet Track Utility to bring the … Read More
Gain Staging: What to know, & why you shouldn’t stress too much about it!
FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW: There’s a lot of emphasis placed on the importance of gain staging within the audio community, and while it is important to understand, it’s also exaggerated as the lynchpin between a good mixer and a bad mixer. Personally I would argue that monitoring is a much higher priority, so lets spend a few moments discussing what … Read More