Episode 17 - Gain Staging
Show Notes
Gain Staging
Live With Matt Rad - Episode 17
Sept 08, 2020
w/ Jon Castelli - Week 16
Show notes by: Bradley Will
As soon as you have a hit people start reaching out to you to do that exact same thing.
No mixer or producer wants to be the vibe killer. Ever. Don’t ever kill the vibe.
Gain Staging:
The first thing Jon does on every mix is lower everything by 6dB to give himself more headroom. He does this himself. He prefer his assistants deliver a mix that sounds exactly like the rough mix they’re presented with.
You can’t just clip gain everything down because it changes how the plugins are reacting to the level. You have to change it post plugins to maintain the sonics.
Jon keeps his faders at zero all of the time. At zero you are getting the best resolution in every DAW.
Jon never changes the volume of the rough mix when he is A/Bing.
It always has to stay at the client’s intended volume and he has to work back up to this level.
Gain Staging For Transient-Rich Signals:
How do you bring back the aggressive character of a limited rough mix?
Multiband saturators. Saturate the midrange to make it feel more hyped.
Ozone exciter. Distort it as far as it will go to get the character, try all settings, and then bring it back down to match.
Don’t fuck with the fake clipped kick drum punch. Don’t do broad strokes. That’s not how Dr. Dre or Ali are approaching their sounds.
Don’t go over 4dB of gain addition/reduction in your limiter.
Q: Big kicks. How do you approach those?
The only way to get the proper length of a kick drum is with proper gain staging.
9/10 times the kick and vocal are the loudest thing in the rough mix.
Jon tends to mix with his kicks up front.
The minute you turn up a kick drum into a limiter the limiter is now dictating the length of the kick.
Jon’s challenge:
Know where your vibe is coming from at all times. Is it coming from a buss compressor, or the individual sounds together, or somewhere else?
Are there differences in gain staging for a live-sounding record versus a more programmed record?
Jon uses a lot of saturation in place of compression.
Jon gets the density to match pop music this way.
Jon doesn’t want to minimize the importance of getting vibe from clipping, like drums in FL Studio.
Clipping Ableton makes things sound small and clipping in PT sounds like shit.
FL is prob the only DAW with any vibe.
Never clip within plugins. Keep your inputs low.
John doesn’t like OTT at all cause it gives fake vibe and kills transients.
It’s good on individual tracks, but is shit if it’s used on everything.
