An Indie Musician's Diary VOL. 1

Worship Nights & Gain Staging Continued

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Worship night: I just posted an event on Facebook called Worship Night. I am going to lead worship and share a little bout what worship on Sunday afternoons this Spring from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. It'll be at my house until we don't fit here anymore. This requires some extra rehearsal and creating a set for each week. More than anything it requires that I, myself, press into the presence of God and pray for those who come. Worship is a lifestyle, a weapon, a comfort, a tool, and is totally beautiful. He is totally beautiful. All I have to do is lay it all down at the Lord's feet, practice and get out of the way. He will do the rest: heal people, lighten their heavy load and more. We felt the need for this because we felt that our home church needed more. 

I'd like to fix some party lights (to create a good atmosphere) and a find guitar chair (it is hard to stand for longer periods of time). Otherwise we have everything we need. 

I'm still learning how to adjust volume on the various gates of the mixing process, (gain staging). It reminds me of Göta Canal. There are a series of locks to go through and the levels of the water in those locks makes the boats flow up or down hill but always in one direction forward to get the boat where it needs to go. In the same way, the input volume is going to the main output fader in a series of stages that need the volume or "gain" to be regulated in order for the sound to blend together to a cumulative level with enough headroom to allow for the mastering stage. If you have too much flow in the end it clips and your ears hear distortion.

Technical stuff for indie musicians/producers:

Bass: Did some minor adjustments to the bass today. Timing, spice and gain staging test. 

Gain staging is the next thing for me to understand and incorporate: Here comes the next wave of mixing knowledge flowing onto my mental "beach", gain staging. It is going to take me all this week to understand how to apply this to the Change My Mind project. As with all other information in mixing, there are many different ways to attack this and I have to learn through trial and horror how to apply this in different situations.

Gain staging is controlling the flow of audio volume through the various stages of making a song. All the individual instruments come in at an input volume and to create headroom for mastering you want to keep things at levels that accommodate that.

I'm trying to see to it that I put in at least two hours of mixing a day during the learning process, applying what I already know instead of just constantly pouring in more info into my overloaded brain. That way I don't forget what I am learning.I do have a question mark about gain staging in Logic that needs to be addressed this week before I can run down the bullet points of the Finishing Your Mix video that I posted earlier. 

The video at the top is how to use gain staging in Logic Pro, finding the pre-fader button and knowing how to use it. Here is the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71xgueCFHX4

I have a lot of questions: Is it smart to mark certain areas of a track (that are much louder than others) and reduce the gain on them until they visually look like the softer parts of the song (evening out the volume)? Does that make the compressor work less (saving CPU)? That is the theory of the next video, below. 

He uses this method to even out the whole track. You may kill some of the dynamics this way but you get a more even track and use less compression. I haven't tried it yet.

I do like how this guy applied it to this track. It made the vocal clearer. Don't you think? 

The video on the top shows how to maintain some basic level management throughout the mixing stage: 

O.k. I hate to admit it. But this is the first time that I put pre-fader metering on. (Until today I didn't know that that button existed! Shame!) How could I know all this stuff and still miss it. (Don't see the forest for the trees I guess...)

Anyway, so I went back into my project, the Change My Mind song (The neeeever ending story) and switched to pre-fader and this is what happened: pretty much nothing sound wise.

But I saw that the input levels of the bass, sax and a few other things were running very hot and a few things were a bit weak actually. Nothing was clipping, tho.

I slapped on a gain plugin at the top of the affected tracks and reduced the ones that were too hot. What now? Tomorrow, I am going to look through the Finishing Your Mix video and the one at the top and continue to "chew grass" until everything is digested. Then I might just call my mentor for some advice. Thank God, for my mentor!

Moo! My mind is taking all this in and chewing information just like a cow does grass. All the options on how and when to use gain staging... Which one is best and when? Where? How? Looks like becoming an audio engineer is going to take years of practice. Just saying...