Gain Staging
Sunday, January 18th, 2026 05:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snoozefestaudio18F with flurries, going down to single digits tonight.
I was up by 3PM today, which is much better than the 5PM of the past few weekends.
I had to get out while it was still daylight, to a parking garage down the street, so I could get up on the roof level (5th floor) and take a photo of my building.
Reason being that this tower is a pokestop, but the photo for it, in game, is a crooked picture of the plaque out front, which is unreadable due to low contrast.
The photo dates back to the early ingress days, when this building was submitted as a portal.
But on the phone with Colleen last night, we realized that if I submitted a new photo, and She, Justin, and myself gave it a like, it would become the new default picture!.. or so we theorize.
So I got my shot, then cropped it and submitted it, but it'll have to be approved first before it appears as a secondary photo for the pokestop. So in a few weeks we'll see. But if it works, I'm gonna do it for several other pokestops around downtown.
I then fired up FL Studio and opened up Reavis 309, then saved it as a new file with a FNMX suffix, for Final Mix. And then I got to work on the track volumes, via the board faders.
I didn't realize until I looked it up today, but the volumes are never supposed to spike above the 0 threshold, and many things were! So I silenced everything and started with just the kick... working in the other drums and cymbals one by one, followed by the bass, guitar, cello, violin, and lastly the xylophone.
Some of them I had to pull down quite a bit to stop them from going into the red. A few others needed boosting.
And even after I had every individual track out of the red, for it's own channel, there remained a few spikes in the red on the master channel, due to the combined strikes of loud elements here and there... so I had to pull down the master fader a bit more.
Once the whole mix was as loud as it could be without any spikes above 0, I exported it as a WAV, and am now about to import it into the Reavis vocal AUP3. And then in there, I'll work on the volumes of the sound effects and the vocals to try and get everything balanced.
Unfortunately, I cannot monitor the results in the iLouds tonight, because we have a very loud protest going on right across the street, with people chanting loudly as lead by a guy with an amplifier.
Apparently the theater up the street is holding a fundraiser, at which Jerry Seinfeld is appearing, and the protesters are very upset with him, because of his controversial stances on various things.
So... their chanting and drum beating makes near field monitoring impossible, and i'm sure they won't be done until it's past quiet hours here in the building.
It's the kind of random problem you never imagine could screw up a day off.
So I'll have to just monitor in headphones and watch the meter in Audacity.
Talk to you later tonight.
Okay, so the new version of Reavis was saved as our first WORK04.AUP3 file, in the WORK04 folder.
I pasted in the FNMX version of the music (gain staged) and then stretched Audacity's meter hoizontally to display a lot more granularity... and set the buffer length back to 100ms, from the 300ms it had been set at for the previous work.
That buffer reset made the meter reflect things in real time.
I solo'd the different vocal and SFX tracks to get them peaking just below 0, on the meter, and then, with the full mix playing, adjusted the vocals down another dB, just to be safe.
That mix was exported as an FNMX.WAV.
The resulting waveform looked thin... peaks not exceeding zero, but the main body was now quieter than I wanted.
In other words, the peaks were too far away from the average volume... such that caging the peaks below zero meant the main bits of the mix were now too quiet.
I knew this was an issue best addressed by going into FL and doing custom compression on each individual track, but... that's a lot of detailed work for another day!
Tonight, I just wanted to beef up the gain-staged Ruff Record version!.. cuz I knew from yesterday's auditon that the EQ and room sound are quite good, so... why not just compress the whole mix to see what happens?
Consulting AI for assistance, I came up with a compressor setting, to lightly tame the peaks, and a limiter setting to beef up the body.
And after some experimentation I found that if I applied them both twice; comp, limit, comp again, limit again, it nicely squared up the wave form without any pumping or flutter!
I then undid it all back to scratch and applied a very light, almost subliminal, stereo room reverb to the entire mix... and then did my serial comp, limit, comp, limit again.
The result was a nicely squared, robust mix, with no pumping or flutter, not totally flat... still with a healthy bit of dynamic range, that sounded far better than the original Ruff Record mix.
Essentially, what I'd done was leapfrog straight to the mastering stage!
Gain staging? Yes! Surgical PQ2 after spectral analysis? No! Custom compression of each instrument? No! Just... gain-staged rough mix, now rough mastered with global verb, and global, serial compression/limiting.
But the result was informative! The leapfrogged mastering did really glue things together! It brought out the collective reverb, and substantially leveled the volume of things.
It wasn't a perfect master, by any means, but it was an improvement on the Ruff Record, and it gave me some needed experience with compression and limiting.
I then went back to Archeology, the song, and repeated the whole experiment, saving the FL music as a new FNMX version, then doing the gain staging for both the lo-fi, and HD stems... then bringing those into a new FNMX version of the vocal AUP3 file, etc.
I did the frog mastering to it, and then I did the same frog mastering to the crypt sequence, and the time travel sequence.
Then I strung it all together in a new file; crypt, Archeology, time travel, Reavis... all gain balanced and frog mastered.
And that... was the inception of what I'm now calling, the Rogue Record!
The Rogue Record is just the Ruff Record... gain balanced, with proto mastering of room verb and serial compression/limiter to square out the wave form.
That proto-mastering is only for experimentation... it won't be permanent.
But I feel that the Rogue Record could teach me a little more about how to approach the final mix!
Because with everything gain-balanced, and frog mastered, it's easier to hear what's really wanting for custom compression and EQ adjustment, in each song.
Still, I was only able to hear my new start to the Rogue Record in headphones, thanks to the protesters, who now have all gone home.
So tomorrow I'll air it in the iLouds, and we'll go from there I guess.
These are my first unsure steps into the world of mix/mastering for an art rock album meant to sound live.
It could take me a week or two to really get my sea legs on this, but this is how I've started.
Talk to you tomorrow.
°¦}
