Gain staging, loudness metering, and audio signal flow

[Solomon]

Keyboardist in a cover band here. Before I starting using software instruments, and was just using whatever sounds I could find among the presets in whatatever keyboard I was using, I always had a terrible time knowing how loud or quiet I was. The other musicians were constantly having to ask me to turn up or turn down. Now that I’m jumping feet-first into Gig Performer, I’m thinking I can do better than that.

In between its source at the outputs of your VST instruments and its destination at your Audio Out block, what do you do with your audio signal?

I’m thinkng of doing maybe something like this:

1. insert effects (phaser, distortion, tremolo, chorus, amp/cab emulation, etc)
2. gain controls (not exposed through widgets) to get all the instruments to around the same loudness
3. gain controls or mixer block (controlled by widgets) for the player to adjust levels to taste
4. individual compressors per instrument to control dynamics
5. mixer block to mix down to stereo
6. compressor to glue the mix together
7. master volume control (controlled by a widget)
8. optionally sum to mono (controlled by a switch widget)
9. limiter just in case

Am I getting way too complicated? Or do I have anything out of sequence?

Also, I’d like to put in some loudness metering here and there in the chain… I just installed “Youlean Loudness Meter” on my system, but haven’t started playing around with it yet. I guess I’d want to insert a meter right before the final limiter, but also do I want to put meters on each channel to help me to tune the gain controls from step 2 above?

[Solomon]

Or, wait, did I get steps 3 and 4 backwards? Should the per-instrument compressors go before the faders rather than after?

[Stoffel]

For me as keyboardist the most time the following setup in GP is far enough:

1. Instruments
2. FX as needed
3. Mixer summing up to stereo controlled by widges to change the volumes as needed
4. Audio channel plugin such as Fuse Audio Labs VCS-1 for slightly compressing.
   Should have zero latency!

That’s it. Maybe this will be also a good solution for you.
Don’t think too complicatad as plugins make your setups much more easy.

[schamass]

My approach is the following:

• a gain adjustment for every sound source / plugin in the local rackspace (will be balanced out only once and needed theoretically no midi-connection, but if you have enough knobs… why not)
• a “gain to global” volume adjustment right before the “To Global” block (only stereo for my needs), which is connected with my foot pedal. This allows me to fade out, or give a bit more/less volume but never reach a clipping output level - if the previous gain controls are set right.
• a final “MAIN VOL” gain block in the global rackspace right before the audio outs to be able to change the overall volume that comes from my system.
• meter-widgets for every gain position to have a visual feedback of what’s going on.
• just in case i also placed a PEQ and a compressor into the global signal chain to be able to adjust the general sound if needed, but they both are bypassed in 99% of the time.
• maybe a limiter after the “MAIN VOL” block in the global rackspace would be a useful addition

[Vindes]

@Solomon

The other musicians were constantly having to ask me to turn up or turn down. Now that I’m jumping feet-first into Gig Performer, I’m thinking I can do better than that.

I don’t want to make any assumptions about the scenario you’re talking about here. I hope this doesn’t offend, but that “turn up, turn down” experience reminds me of playing with other guys in the garage or gym several decades ago. We didn’t have a master mixing console, nobody had IEMs, and we all just brought our own amps and adjusted our volumes around the (ridiculously loud) drums.

In that kind of scenario it’s a lot harder (in my experience) for keyboards than other instruments, and “volume” is only part of the issue. Bass, guitar, and vocals just set their volumes to mesh with the drums, then expect the keyboard player can just turn his volume knob to fit in.

Depending on what keyboard sounds you’re playing the issue can be volume, dynamics, or frequency balance. I remember “dude, you’re making everything sound like mud, turn it down” followed by “dude, we can barely hear you, turn it up.” None of us knew what the heck we were doing, and it’s actually a much more difficult problem to solve than we understood. At 19, about the only thing we could all agree on was that the keyboards were a problem.

schamass’s suggestion of a parametric EQ is good, but I’d also want to make sure you really figure out all the issues.

Back then I learned I had to crush the dynamics of everything I played. What worked for a Beethoven recital (from a technique and sound perspective) had no real place in a rock band. I generally had to cut the low frequencies hard (unless i was covering bass, like for a Doors song) and even today I find it difficult when recording at home to balance how guitar and keyboards sit together in a mix.

Once you understand what the different types of problems are and how to hear them it’s easier to solve. But there are a lot of guys who play instruments for a living that don’t really get it and don’t care to. That’s what they have sound guys, engineers, and producers for. If you don’t have those guys, their jobs become your job, because all the other guys know they sound great until the keyboard player joins the mix. (I think I still have emotional scars from 35 years ago )

[Solomon]

@schamass

• a gain adjustment for every sound source / plugin in the local rackspace (will be balanced out only once and needed theoretically no midi-connection, but if you have enough knobs… why not)
• a “gain to global” volume adjustment right before the “To Global” block (only stereo for my needs), which is connected with my foot pedal. This allows me to fade out, or give a bit more/less volume but never reach a clipping output level - if the previous gain controls are set right.

When you’re layering sounds do you have a way of controlling the relative mix?

• meter-widgets for every gain position to have a visual feedback of what’s going on.

I’d love to have some kind of an alert that flashes if my master output gets too close to hitting the limiter… not just a little meter turning red in the corner, but like, the whole screen flashing at me or something. Maybe that can be done by connecting the metering parameter of a mixer block through a particular scaling curve to the transparency of a big shape object.

[Solomon]

@Vindes

I don’t want to make any assumptions about the scenario you’re talking about here. I hope this doesn’t offend, but that “turn up, turn down” experience reminds me of playing with other guys in the garage or gym several decades ago.

No, of course this doesn’t offend. This is exactly the stuff I want to get on top of. Thanks for the detailed response!

For this gig there will be a full PA and a professional sound tech. Not sure if we’ll have IEM’s or not. But the thing is… the sound tech will be there for the sound check and they’ll stop by once in a while, maybe at the beginning or end of the occasional set, but they won’t be sitting there operating the board during each song. So, once they get my general level right in the mix during sound check, I’ll be on my own for balancing my individual sounds within each song and from song to song.