Put simply, Gain Staging is all about allowing Headroom in your mix, both on a track-by-track basis, but also in subsequent buses and, of course, the main stereo bus. A simple sign of bad Gain Staging, therefore, is either a Master Fader, or individual channel faders, dramatically attenuated below their unity position. To solve the distortion issue, you’ll take one of two solutions – either turning down the master fader (the quick and easy approach) or attenuating the individual faders, often pulling them right down in the mix. Assemble a collection of these loops into a composition, therefore, and before you know it, the Master fader is clipping red. On the whole, most Loops are recorded ‘hot’, often mastered with compression to peak at 0dBFS. If you’ve ever tried producing music using Apple Loops in Logic Pro X (or, indeed, and other loop-based sample content) you’ll soon be aware of the need for Gain Staging. As a result, many engineers are returning to a mixing and production workflow that values dynamic range and headroom – the art of Gain Staging, in other words. Of course, this methodology is a guaranteed route to producing a loud mix, but even in the case of more compressed music styles (like EDM, for example) the lack of sonic headroom makes for a confined and restricted working environment.
One of the big problems of the Loudness Wars was a tendency to work consistently up to 0dBFS – in other words, pushing everything in the mix, even the mix itself, as close to the top of the meter scale as possible. Put simply, choice is being put back in our hands – we can choose between our music is pushed to the limits or an alternative where we give the arrangement room to breathe without fear the listener hears a dramatically quieter mix. Streaming has actively changed the way we produce music, in this case, driven by the Loudness Correction used by the likes of Spotify and iTunes that actively turns down overcooked masters. There’s a quiet revolution taking place in the music production industry – a movement that places emphasis on transient detail and dynamic range rather than the ‘needles in the red’ sound that epitomised the Loudness Wars.
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