Gain Staging and DB Measuring

General discussion about Gig Performer
1

I am new to gig performer and have been setting up a live rig for my band to use. Currently Vox, guitar, bass and drums are all routed through GP.

For gain staging, I’ve seen advice saying to target levels of -18db, but a lot of the plugins I use are already way hotter than that at their default settings. For guitar and bass, we’re using NueralDSP right now and playing around with Nueral Amp Modeller for some other tones. When we go through these, the gain levels are far above -18 (using waves vu meter with 18db headroom). They don’t sound bad at those levels either, they sound fine to my ear. In order to achieve -18 targets on these instruments, I’d have to take the output levels way down on the plugins (for the Fortin Nameless NDSP plugin I have to take it to -13 db on the plugin before its down to that floor)

I am just wondering if this is correct/appropriate and how everyone else is handling gain staging for their amp sims.

2

In a band setting, I set my loudness target to ~ -22dB. I end up lowering the post volume via Gain/Balance plugin ~ 9dB, so that’s a similar relative amount compared to your own findings.

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3

It’s interesting, because the plugins are all set up default in such a way as to immediately blow that threshold out of the water. I wonder why?

4

Because everyone wants to be louder than everyone else

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5

So they’re overcompensating before the signal gets to the mixing end of the chain

6

If you were playing solo, then those stock signals would be fine. However, once you add in other audio sources, its way too loud.

7

TLDR - it only matters if you have analog modeled plugins in your chain… and don’t pass 0.

The whole point of -18 is to hit a standard that approximates 0dbV/u in the analog world.

The -18 is in dbfs— decibels full scale. In the analog world, if you hit a device at 0db, that was its sweet spot. You could go beyond it and saturate the individual components to get a different sound. It wasn’t always better, and not all engineers were trying to achieve that sound unlike what marketing material would have you believe.

In today’s digital world, if you pass 0dbfs, you’ve gone beyond the full scale. There is no more head room, and you’ll digitally clip.

The math cuts the top of the wave form in a brutal, unmusical way. This is where “clipping is bad, don’t clip” comes from.

Plugin manufacturers needed a way to “clip” when modeling analog hardware without passing digital 0, so they made a reference “0” in the full scale of -18. Well, some of them. Waves sets most of its at -18, other developers hit -12, some plugins you can move the reference.

At the end of the day, if you don’t use analog models, like an 1176, a tube amp, etc, with a PRESET 0 “DbV” reference level, just don’t go pass digital zero on the final output. A lot of us use limiters on the global rack space for this.

If you DO use something in your chain:

  1. if it sounds good it is good
  2. read the manuals.
  3. Watch the both plugin meter while you play and the mixer meter. If the plugin has a VU meter, listen to what happens when you pass into the red and peg it.

Happy playing!

8

I did eventually restate everything to use a -18dbfs target, and just used the master volume to control our loudness through the PA, and just from balancing all the levels to a single target was able to get a clearer mix for Vox and bass. I have everything going through a limiter before the PA send anyway so I wasn’t worried about clipping, but I did find that just balancing everyone to a target rather than by ear did finally improve our sound, so I got something out of this foray

Thanks for all the advice!

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