Gain Structure

People tend to go on and on these days about summing mixers and headroom and I find myself scratching my head at times wondering if many of us know even remotely what were going on about. Let me preface all of this with the following: I really loved recording to tape. Deeply. It was such a fragile and delicate thing, you know? Generally the step that followed getting drum sounds together on day one of a record was to throw up a reel of tape and see how said drums were going to come back. Youd listen, discuss...probably ask the assistant engineer to adjust your tape machine alignment a time or two before ultimately wheeling a different model machine in before the day was out. Nuance and subtlety, perhaps total self-indulgence; but above all, it was CARING. It was REALLY listening to how the equipment colored the sound and sorting out what would be deemed as appropriate. And once everyone settled on the aesthetic for the album, each and every track printed would be a similar process of choosing a mic, getting the appropriate chain together (preamp, eq, limiter) and then seeing how that track was going to come back from tape and making adjustments from there. Print a couple dB too little and tape hiss will be a problem later if you want to whack a couple dB of 10k on that guitar in the mix. Print too hot and transient stuff like drums and acoustic guitars come back all mushy and over saturated. Recording was an actual art...Dont get me wrong, Im not saying that the art is gone in these days of mac-based workstations and summing mixers, I am just re-remembering the days when a blatant attention to fine detail was not a choice but an absolute necessity if you wanted to keep working. Remembering the feeling of dread when you just knew you should have notched the preamps up across the entire desk on that gentle song because you knew the mixer was going to be cursing you as he tried to get some sparkle in to the track without creating a shit-storm of tape hiss. So, Im rambling slightly. Lets get back on track here. Gain structure. I had an amazing mentor, early in my career in Los Angeles, named Jimmi Mayweather. He had been making records for what sounded like 700 years when I met him in the early 90s at Grandmaster Recorders where I was a studio assistant. I remember the first day he rolled in on a tracking date, I walked in to the control room having set up his fairly minimal mic setup on a drum kit and saw him putting every single fader on the console to unity gain (or the zero mark). Dude hadnt heard a note yet and here he was setting fader values? I walked over to the patchbay and asked him what compressors hed like patched and he rolled his eyes somewhat and went back to what he was doing without saying a word. He asked me to patch a few busses and channels to tape but made no mention of other outboard gear. He then asked the drummer to go out and knock around a little but quickly did a scan around the room at all the unpatched limiters and began spinning input and output knobs to what looked like entirely random places, again having not heard a note. WTF!? I then watched this man spin up a fairly insane drum sound touching only mic preamps and phase buttons. He walked out and moved a couple mics, came back in and fiddled with the phase buttons some more, went back out and moved the room mics a little, more phase button fiddling...wow. I was totally perplexed. I didnt really know about phase buttons at that point and I couldnt believe a man could be near so much gear and not USE it. Finally, he asked me to patch a few

compressors here and there and damn if he didnt touch one of them. Theyd been pre-tweaked somehow? WTF!?? This was not in the book. So, after the session I was able to ask him what the deal was? Did he dislike faders? Maybe he was just showing off with the whole dialing in the compressors before the session thing? Maybe this was all a big joke? And what I got that evening was an explanation of gain structure that totally changed everything I had thought about recording equipment. And it was pretty simple really. I asked him about the faders. Apparently, every single piece of outboard gear and module of the console operates most efficiently when passing audio at an average amplitude of +4dB (measured approximately 1.23V AC on a multimeter or 0 on a VU meter). He explained that if you had the fader on a channel at 10dB, you would have to drive everything that was patched before the fader in the recording chain 10dB hotter than necessary to get that same 0VU to the tape machine. He said that it was like driving a car pressing the brake and the gas at once. (light bulb) That ideally, you would simply boost the incoming microphone level to 0VU at the mic preamp and patch the output of the preamp to tape. If you wanted to add a limiter, youd only do so once your mic preamp level was set directly to tape and youd adjust the input and output levels of said limiter so that you had the appropriate level still getting to tape with it patched and functioning as desired. This is called unity gain: a piece of gear having at its output the exact same level as its input...and unity gain is all were striving for, all day, every day. At Grandmaster, I learned these ropes on a Neve 8028 console. These consoles are really just a big chassis full of separate equipment modules that feed one another via the patchbay. The mic preamp feeds an EQ, which feeds a fader, which feeds a bussing matrix all via patchpoints in the patchbay. So, if I just left the fader at zero and adjusted the mic preamp so the Bass DI level to tape was ideal, I could then add a limiter and adjust the input and threshold knobs of the limiter so that I was getting the wanted effect and then adjust the output knob so that I was still reading the ideal level to tape. Id know that the limiter was operating at unity gain and therefore inducing the smallest amount of noise and distortion possible while doing its job as well as it possibly could as it was operating as designed. This sounds pretty simple. And I started realizing immediately that drum sounded really open and alive because transients were not getting squared off due to overdriving the circuits of the other pieces of gear in the recording chain. And it was all so immediate! Just let the mic preamp do all the work of getting the signal to the appropriate level, and then color the sound with all of these wonderful boxes but be mindful of keeping the level of the instrument you are recording at 0VU at each and every point of the process. I could totally do that...And what was crazy was watching all these other engineers roll in and just spin the shit out of every knob in the room and then wonder why things sounded small and sort of crappy. Hmmmmm. Folks start blaming the tools when actually they just dont know how to use them. How does this all play in to workstations and summing mixers? I hope you arent ACTUALLY asking that of course. ITS THE EXACT SAME PRINCIPLE HERE! ProTools doesnt magically remove the necessity to be a decent engineer and to be mindful of gain structure. To know what 0VU is all times at all points of the chain. Who could think that?

I remember the early ProTools days, ProTools 3 in fact. I remember 16 bit audio and it was a total bum-out. A strange thing happened back then...We all attempted to record some drums to ProTools and listened and tried some more. We over-compressed everything trying to get some depth and space to the recording and eventually some of us gave up in those early days of multitrack digital audio. It was hard. Eventually, a crazy idea started floating around that the way to get more depth of field (so to speak) in digital audio was to record your tracks as hot as humanly possible. The thinking was that if you only had 16 bits to fill, recording hotter would fill more bits and therefore give you more dynamic depth. A standard even emerged which made the red level on a digital scale way up there at like 8 or 10 dB over zero on a VU meter. What? Remember all those years of 0VU being the standard? Remember how every stick of equipment on Earth was designed to operate at 0VU. Can someone please explain to Jimmi and I how its entirely acceptable to print all your tracks at 8, 10, 12 dB hotter than any gear was ever meant to operate? Am I on crazy pills? Maybe I missed the memo that suggests all this lovely analog outboard gear doesnt distort and squash transients the same way now that theres a ProTools rig in the room? Did I miss that? Oh man, Im getting all worked up here...this is an actual rant. Damn, Im not done yet: I mix on an analog console. I just like it that way. I have a workflow. Nearly every project I receive from people as a ProTools or Logic session contains tracks that are printed way, way, way too hot. Seriously. My first step in any mix is to open a trim plugin across every single track and get the signal down to a respectable 0VU level. I am not looking to blow up the front end of my console, overdrive my equalizers, induce crazy level mismatches in my outboard gear or utterly ruin what headroom my mid-level console does have. In my world of analog mixing, its absolute necessity to trim those tracks down to where they should be in order to function but gain structure is also a deep consideration in the digital domain as well. You know what all of your plugins are designed to operate at or near? 0VU. You know those little red lights you keep lighting up on your plugin limiters? Maybe think about those and do that way less. Theres this funny idea that a digital mixer lacks headroom and I have to just finally be the one to say it: Bad engineering and ass-hat style gain staging is the route to headroom problems, not the workstation! How can you have your stereo buss fader pulled down 9 dB and meter all in the red and feel like a Dangerous 2 Bus is the answer to the mix feeling a little folded in on itself? I just want to slit my wrists sometimes! If you were to print the tracks at a reasonable level, operate you plugins at a reasonable level, and build a mix whos cumulative energy equalled a reasonable level at the stereo buss, Id wager youd be reasonably surprised at the width and depth possible within todays in the box mixers. Listen, most of us keep our A/D converters aligned so that -16 on the digital scale equals 0VU. What that means is that you should be adjusting your mic preamp so that the average peaks of any given track hover around -16 on the trackss digital meter. In ProTools, that is just below where the meter turns yellow. Its about half of the level one is able to print. What that means is all that space you arent using is a little something we call headroom. The space in a circuit that exists above the nominal operating level which allows things like spiky transients and deep rich bottom and sub-human artifacts pass and affect a listener. Seriously. I understand all too well how there is something vaguely

testosterone inducing about printing rock music louder...but hotter isnt louder. Hotter is absolutely less rich and smaller. I mean that with my heart. Seriously dudes, chill out a little. Just treat -16 on the digital scale of your DAW as the place you're aiming for as opposed to the top of the meter. I take great pride in looking across the meters of a song as overdubs come along and see that each and every track is beautifully and uniformly printed at just the right level. I'm a freak, I realize - but that's my job. THAT IS WHAT I AM HIRED AND PAID TO DO. And listen, don't get me wrong; If you want to overdrive a mic pre for effect, by all means dont hesitate. Spin the shit out of that 1176, please! If your panties get all soggy thinking about driving a circuit harder with that particular acoustic guitar because you think it reminds you of the Kinks, help yourself. I am suggesting here that having a consistently even and proper gain structure on the majority of your recorded tracks will have a cumulative effect across the entire song or album that is simply higher-fi. Prove me wrong, I dare you. Your plugins will sound better. Your faders will ride nearer zero as you mix which will mean those precious lower bits, which amount to dynamic range, will actually make it through the stereo buss and in to your listener's earholes. Plus, your mother might give you the attention you always craved. Winning! In the old days, the tape machine would very immediately dictate precisely what level you were to print. If you printed too hot or too little there were immediate consequences. You didnt get a second chance. When the band nailed a pass, if you were sitting in the control room mumbling something about how you didnt know they were going to play quieter and maybe they could do a few more takes once you had the preamps adjusted, youd just get fired, go home, and not get called again. I know that I sound like a bitter old fart here, but seriously...Were all getting really lazy. Im just putting this out there: Can we all stop thinking the next summing mixer is going to make our records finally sound like records and go back to being mindful engineers? Anyone can melodyne a vocal, beat detective some drums, and elastic time some other shit but it takes grace and touch and little bit of know-how to capture music.