A quick story to demonstrate the importance of gain structure. When I first started producing, I didn't touch levels very much. I thought "Hey, I can hear each part, nothing sounds too loud, the levels must be fine!" and kept working. My tracks were alright I suppose, but the tracks would always feel squashed, so to speak, with no room to breathe. All of the space within the sonic world I was creating was completely full of sound.
But then I learned about how you should structure the levels of your music, and things changed for the better. Suddenly, each element of the track had more room to breathe, was clearer (generally, there are a lot of things that affect clarity), and I could make my music seem louder and more professional. Granted, my tracks are still nowhere near professional quality, but they sound much better.
So - what's the secret?!?!
Well, first, we have to look at an important concept called headroom. Headroom is probably the most integral part of this entire lesson, so listen up.
Headroom is the difference between the volume level something currently sits at, and the absolute maximum level it can sit at. The absolute maximum is, on most DAWs, the point where if you exceed that level, you will get clipping.
First, we should answer a basic question: why do we want headroom and proper gain structure? Put simply, your mixes will sound cleaner, bigger, louder (after mastering), and more powerful. If you use up all your headroom, your track will feel cramped and squashed, without room to fill the space in your head where the music plays. Why do your tracks sound so small compared to Kryptic Mind's enormous caverns, or next to Deadmau5's arena sized synths? Easy: they have headroom, you don't.
So. Imagine one, single, lonely volume fader. It runs from -infinity dB up to, lets say, 0dB, just for simplicity (I honestly have no idea what it would be, but I don't really care
). You set your fader to -6dB. So, here's what we have: your fader is capable of pushing the level to 0dB, and you have brought it down to -6dB. This leaves 6dB more volume you can use safely, right? NO. By pulling the volume down on your one track, you reduce the chance of your track peaking and clipping. By having that 6dB of headroom, you open up more room for power, clarity, volume, all that good stuff.Let's look at that idea some more, in real depth. How does pulling down the level help prevent clipping? Intuitively, you can already answer that; less volume = less clipping. At a basic level, that's true, but there's more going on than that. Let's go back to one fader, but this time all we have is a sample of a guy yelling "Hello!!". If your sample is quite quiet, then you can push your fader to 0dB without worry. If, however, the sample is quite loud, you should pull the level down. Here's why: any sound has a waveform. If you look at soundcloud, you'll see this. In a waveform, you can see the peaks and valleys that make up the sound. If the peaks (loudest bits) of a sound hit the upper limit of your DAW (in our case, 0dB), then you have two problems: you risk clipping, and more pertinent to this lesson, you have absolutely no headroom to work with. What does this mean? Simply, you want to avoid hitting the upper limit on your DAW so you can preserve headroom.
So, how to we make sure our tracks have plenty of headroom? Easy - TURN YOUR CHANNELS DOWN. This is going to be hard for you to do at first. Your tracks will be quiet. Too quiet. You'll want to turn it up. I know you will. RESIST. Volume does not come from mixing. Volume comes from mastering, which isn't something you should worry about. After you've mixed your track, with channels down and plenty of headroom, then slap a limiter on the end of the master signal chain to make up for a bit of volume. That's the best a bedroom producer without mastering experience can really hope for, and you know what? Your track will sound better. Try it out.
