What’s your first step once you have all your tracks imported into your template? Colour coding for easy identification? Making sure all track names make sense? If you came from the days of analogue recording you’re probably yelling “gain staging!”, because that’s what we did. That’s where we started.

What Is Gain Staging?

The idea comes from the days of gain staging analogue equipment. We used to try to optimise the gain stage of our equipment for 2 main reasons.

• To maximize our signal to noise ratio.

• To maximize the efficiency of the console’s faders. Faders are logarithmic, which means the farther from Unity (or zero) you move the fader the bigger the difference each small fader move makes.

In other words, a tiny movement of the fader up near unity yields much finer control than that same small movement farther down the fader’s throw.

So, while this was originally meant to work around limitations in the hardware, there are still benefits in the digital realm. Plugins tend to react better with a signal near unity, especially the analogue modelling plugins. They are usually created to deliver their best-modelled tones with a healthy signal near unity, and since the inserts are pre-fader, this is your chance to optimize the gain going into your plugins.

Keep in mind that the plugin inserts on your DAW are all pre-fader. So the gain of the file itself is the controlling factor of how much signal is hitting those plugins.

With all of our faders at unity (or zero, if you prefer), a properly gain staged mix already had a basic balance. There were many reasons for the focus on gain staging. With all the electronics in our signal paths, we were fanatical about maximizing our signal to noise ratio and minimizing any negative effects of all that gear.

All that aside, it’s a good idea to start with gain staging because it can really help speed up your mixing process. I know that I’m a fan of any technique that gets me to better results in less time.

Check out this short video to see how quickly it can be done. Although I have shown it with Pro Tools, the principle applies to any DAW.

And there you go. In under 2 minutes, I’ve achieved a very rough balance of the instrumental part of this mix. I would then go on to vocals and when done with that I could move on to mixing knowing that I’m starting with properly gained tracks that are already somewhat balanced. This always speeds up the mixing phase for me & I hope it does for you too.