Let’s talk about a technique that falls into the “not fun/unsexy” category of audio, but is absolutely a subject to know and tame before deciding you want to break things – gain staging. We get a number of support tickets asking why Valhalla plugins suddenly stop outputting audio, and the first thing we ask the customer is, “What is the level of the signal entering the plugin?” We have implemented safety limiters inside the plugins so if the input level exceeds +12dBFS (that’s 12 decibels OVER digital 0, which is where your converters are clipping), the output of the plugin immediately shuts off and the audio slowly fades back in when the signal drops below that level. This is designed to protect your speakers and ears, but is also a warning that things may be getting a bit out of control with the gain staging of your project.

Back in Ye Olde Analogue Days™, recording gear was designed with an optimal operating level, and while manufacturers had their own standards for settings, these all fell within a certain range where interfacing pieces of equipment from various companies all worked perfectly well when these operating levels were adhered to; the concept of gain staging was all about maintaining correct levels when chaining various pieces of gear from one to another. At its simplest, this might have been a microphone plugged into a preamp followed by an equalizer, then a compressor, and ultimately the tape machine. The output of the tape machine was patched to the mixing console which had a number of additional gain stages – line input, EQ, maybe a built-in compressor on the channel strips, the internal groups or buses, and the final mix output which may have it’s own compressor, and then finally on to the mix down recorder. That simple scenario for a single microphone might be subject to a dozen gain stages at the most basic level; each of those stages introduces the possibility of distortion or saturation when driven incorrectly (we’ll get to that as a creative tool later, but for now we’re trying to not break things…). With proper levels between the stages in the audio chain, you were treated to a truly fantastic sound.

At this point, you’re probably saying, “Stuff it, old man! We have internal 32-bit floating point levels in our DAWs with over 1000dB of theoretical dynamic range! I don’t need to know or care about proper levels any more – HAHA!” Well, yes and no. First of all, everything audio in your computer has to become analog at some point whether it’s the digital-to-analog converter on the built-in headphone jack, or the output of your audio interface that is connected to your monitor speakers (another digital-to-analog converter, or DAC). These converters have a finite maximum level at which they can operate and pass audio before they clip and distort – think of a bucket that you are filling with water from a hose; once you reach the top of the bucket, the water doesn’t miraculously continue filling it, it begins cascading over the sides and making your wife very mad that you’re getting the floor all wet (this has never happened to me…). That’s digital 0 – you have filled up all the bits the converter can handle and what’s coursing down the sides of our “audio bucket” is distortion.

Another reason why the levels and gain staging within our computer projects is important is that many plugin manufacturers design their products to have an optimal operating level, just like in the Olde Days; if 0dBFS is the maximum they expect their plugin to see, they will design the processes within to be optimized at an operating level of somewhere in the range between -24dB and -16dB; this provides for plenty of headroom within the plugin processing, and can even let it saturate, if the plugin is designed to do so, as the operating level within the plugin approaches 0dBFS. All well and good on that single plugin, but what happens when you follow it with another and you push that to within its theoretical maximum internal operating level? And then another? We’re now at 40dB above 0, so you’re now pulling your master fader in your DAW down close to the bottom of its range because your headphones are clipping. Time to throw a peak limiter on the output bus to catch everything over 0dB and levels be damned! Sure that will absolutely work, but everything in front of that limiter is being pummeled to the very last bit of its poor little audio life. Will it work? Absolutely. Whole genres of music have sprung up around this massively smashed sound (hell, the music industry as a whole and the mastering loudness wars were all about this to an extent) – I’m not passing a value judgement here, just explaining a best-practice scenario.

Let’s say your mix is going along this way, heads are bobbing, but you need a touch of reverb added to the mix bus for a touch of overall ambience; you insert a VintageVerb just before the peak limiter and your mix shuts off. “WTF?!??!?!” This is when we get a support email. Our internal safety limiters are there to make you stop and think about what is happening before our plugin (and prevent your speakers or eardrums from exploding), and that you’re probably over-cooking things by a fair amount. Time to look at your gain staging and adjust.

I’m the last person to tell you not to saturate or distort something; I live for that and love the sound of gear pushed to, or over, its limit – it’s exciting and a little dangerous. I’m also a drummer, so my judgement in general is entirely suspect, but when I’m mixing (my day job), my master fader is parked at analog 0dB (which is +4dBu, or -18dBFS digital, still giving me headroom if I did want to push it around a bit). If I want to hear the mix louder, I turn up my monitors, not the master fader. This ensures that I have a fixed place to maintain a proper output level that I’m not fighting against all the time.

The great benefit to practicing good gain staging is that your final audio will actually sound better! Even if you want to compress/distort/slam a number of your individual tracks for effect, maintaining more overall transient information will give your mix far more impact than what happens when you shave off all the peaks by clipping the signal. You can always apply a peak limiter as the last insert of your mix bus if you really want to crush the whole mix (but I would highly recommend against that…), but even then it will sound better if there is more non-clipped program information coming into it.

I don’t want this to sound like “Old Man Yells at Clouds” or that I’m saying you must operate this way when working on your music, I just think it’s helpful to have a little knowledge about the WHY – these things aren’t designed arbitrarily and operating levels weren’t conceived just to slap a number on a piece of gear. Having this tiny bit of extra knowledge might help you make better sounding music!

I’m not a patient guy. When I sit down to make music, I want stuff to happen NOW. I don’t want to think about what I’m doing – I have to overthink things all the time during the jobby job parts of my job. I want to just sit in front of the computer and some synths, and just let it FLOW, man! Just pure creation!

The results, not surprisingly, are often shoddy as heck. Things are out of sync, there’s clipping in the mix, I’ve recorded with effects that I’d rather change, that sort of thing. It turns out that spending a few extra seconds or minutes to do things right from the get go makes a lot of difference.

This brings us to this week’s prompt: Best Practices. This could also be called “breaking bad habits, forging good habits.” We live in a subjective world, where in many cases there is no single canonical “correct” way of doing things. But we are also working with tools that are often better used in the way that they were designed to be used.

A simple example: I have a lime squeezer that I love. For the first few months that I owned it, I used it the same way I would use other citrus juicers, with the cut side up. This way, the cut side of the lime comes into contact with the part that is “squeezing” it:

One day, I flipped the lime over, so that the cut side was facing downwards. I got so much more juice out of that lime!

So, what are the best practices when working on music? Here’s a few suggestions that Don and I have learned over the past few decades:

• Use External Instrument plugins in your DAW for hardware synths, versus simple audio inserts. In Ableton Live, I used to just record everything on an audio track, without using an external instrument plugin. It turns out that spending a few extra seconds to set up an external instrument on a track helps with managing latency, so that I can add software instruments & drums in the future while keeping everything in sync. Plus, I can record MIDI on the external instrument track, so I can quantize things and record a better quality performance of the synth on a second pass.
• Record to a metronome track when appropriate. Obviously, if you are playing with a live band in the studio, you can ignore this. But if you are tracking by yourself, your job is going to be easier if you have a steady tempo source you can line things up with. I’ve found that even “beatless” ambient music is sometimes easier if I record things to a click track. The pulse of the ambient music may not be easily perceived in the final mix, but having a click track allows me to add more tracks in the future and have them line up in time, rather than relying on “feel” that I may not be feeling for more than a brief moment in time.
• Use sends versus inserts. Don Gunn has written a great blog post on this, but a quick summary of why sends are awesome: more CPU efficient, better management of effects levels, helps glue the virtual space together, allows for additional tone shaping of the effects (i.e. add EQ/compression/distortion to your reverb!). It takes a little more time to set up sends, but once you are in the habit of doing so, it will really improve your workflow.
• Gain staging. Modern DAWs usually use 64-bit double precision floating point processing for their internal summing, so the gain of internal signals doesn’t matter that much from a pure mathematical standpoint. However, most DAWs will clip your output to 0 dB when you are mixing, since your output convertors can’t handle higher signal levels. Plus, most plugins were designed around the concept of signals being well below 0 dB, as this is the common convention used in mixing. The Valhalla plugins have output limiters for safety, in case things go unstable with a corrupt DAW project (it happens from time to time), so the output will be muted if things exceed +12 dB RMS. All this is to say, that you probably shouldn’t be sending +20 dB signals around in your DAW. It might make a cool sound, but the gear wasn’t designed to work that way.

In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert there are few.
– Shunryu Suzuki, “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind,” (a book I haven’t actually read, but need to sit down and read one of these days)

When I was young, I was totally comfortable with being a beginner at new things. Because I didn’t know ANYTHING. It was all new. Flash forward several decades, and there are a few things I know how to do really well. Mainly involving digital signal processing. I’m happy I am an “expert” at some things, but this makes it so much harder to be a beginner at new things. The temptation is strong to just forge ahead with a false sense of authority, pretend that I know what I am doing, and get some stuff done.

As uncomfortable as being a beginner is to me today, there are a lot of benefits to be gained from allowing myself to be a beginner when working on new creative practices. Acknowledging that maybe I don’t know how to do something new, gives me permission to take the time and focus on learning all the possibilities of this new thing.

In the last few months, I have rekindled my interest in modular synthesis. I’ve put together a smaller modular setup for a hypothetical desert island residency, that incorporates Maths by Make Noise.

I’ve owned Maths since 2012, and I knew that it was a powerful module, but I never clicked with it before. I realized that I never allowed myself to be a beginner with Maths, and just made it do things that I could quickly understand, versus taking a deeper dive into how it works. So I decided to sit myself down, take the time, and really figure out what I could do with Maths. The steps I took:

Reading. Maths has an excellent manual, with many cool example patches. I re-read the manual several times and patched up every example as I went along. I also found a useful overview of how Maths works on Zeroes and Ones.

Watching. I tend to avoid video tutorials, as I probably have undiagnosed ADHD I find myself losing patience with the pace of videos. This time around, I decided to embrace the whole “beginner’s mind” aspect of things and watched several videos from beginning to end, stopping them from time to time to patch up an idea that caught my fancy. A few of my favorite Maths tutorials:

Experimenting. Once I’d read the manual and viewed a few tutorials, I started patching up as many ideas as I could think of with Maths. At the time, Maths was basically the only module in my modular apart from the Intellijel Atlantis, so I had to use Maths for almost all modulation purposes. There was a fair amount of intellectualizing going on behind the scenes, but there was also a lot of “what happens when I plug this into that?” My favorite discovery was running pink noise into Channel 1 of Maths, and adjusting the rise and fall times to get a modulation source that sounded like bubbles!

Theory. Ok, this is the DSP developer in me talking: I like to know how things are working under the hood. Maths is essentially a voltage-controlled slew module with a few extra functions and is a spiritual descendent of the Buchla 257, Buchla 281, and Serge Dual Universal Slope Generator modules. I found a great theoretical analysis of the Serge voltage-controlled slew module on Tim Stinchcombe’s site, and am currently reading it and re-reading it until it starts to make sense.

So this week’s creative prompt: Choose something you want to learn more about, and let yourself be a beginner! Read about the subject, watch tutorials, experiment, practice, all that stuff. Don’t worry about being proficient right away – focus on the possibilities that will arise if you approach the subject with humility.

With all due respect and credit to Hemingway for my paraphrased title, there’s not much I find more important about the space in which I spend all day, every day (also known as my studio, “The Office”), than having an organized and ergonomic layout of equipment. Foregoing the subject of room acoustics, which could take up an entire book on its own, I think having a smart layout of the gear one needs to do their job, including the furniture in which it is located, is paramount to not letting the gear get in the way of doing the job. Having everything to hand, feeling you are always at a comfortable position on a good chair, and taking away the mystery/confusion of wanting to have a certain piece of gear plugged in for an inspired moment helps remove the barriers to creation.

This is all fresh and current for me because just a few weeks ago, I upgraded my studio from a pair of Output Sidecars as well as one of their Platform desks, to an Argosy Design V90 desk. I bought the Output gear shortly after it was released, and while it was built well and would possibly serve a composer or someone whose work is based around a piano-style keyboard just perfectly, most of my hired work is as a mix engineer and I use a pair of Avid S1 control surfaces to interface with Pro Tools Ultimate; I found that there wasn’t really a comfortable way to have those controllers placed on the main surface of the Platform while also having my computer keyboard, trackball, and volume controller available in the correct positions simultaneously. I also felt that much of my studio space (a single room in a building behind my house) was being occupied by the furniture needed to house my preamps and compressors, rather than leaving more space for performers or other musical gear (definitely more the latter than the former during the Age of Covid™…).

As a producer and engineer, much of my initial work with bands and artists starts out at large, commercial studios where I’m used to having a sizable analog console with a patchbay on one end of the whole console frame, and then outboard processing either to the side of the console, or in a separate “producer’s desk” behind my place-of-normal-activity at the console. I was hoping to bring a bit more of that kind of workflow into my studio, with most of the gear I need 90% of the time directly in front of me. The Argosy comes with two 10U racks angled into the main surface to either side of the center section, as well as 3U per side behind the main racks (handy for things like power strips). This meant being able to move all of my outboard equipment from two standalone pieces of furniture that flanked my main workspace into the same monolithic structure that also contained the control surfaces, my display, computer keyboard and trackball.

After the days of building the console and rewiring everything in my studio, sitting down at the new desk for the first time was the “moment of truth” – would all of the effort (and expense…) have been worth it? Luckily, I’m happy to report that the answer is a resounding, “YES!” I’ve worked in dozens of studios over the years and had a number of my own setups that have ranged from the at-the-time-ubiquitous IKEA Jerker, to a custom welded, hyper-minimalist desk for nothing more than my computer keyboard, display and monitor controller. All have felt like stop-gap measures until I figured out what I next had in mind and started the process all over again – not the most efficient of methods! I’ve now been working on the Argosy system for a few weeks and it has been brilliant; I’m still feeling comfortable at the end of a 12 hour day (neck/shoulder pain ain’t fun!), every piece of gear is in a logical, organized position, and the whole desk is large enough that I have to get my butt out of my seat to patch things via the patchbay or adjust gear in the uppermost rack spaces. It’s easy to forget that having to do this and change position once in a while (or more) is a really good thing for one’s body (walking the dog/feeding the squirrels is also good…)!

So, what’s the conclusion here? People’s home studios/writing areas have always felt like a constant work-in-progress; gear comes and goes, things get put away, or brought out from being away and left where they lie, only to be forgotten again for months. I think it’s worth taking stock from time to time of the whole system – ergonomics, equipment and furniture – to figure out if everything is being used and set up to its maximum potential; given my recent experience and the success of the final outcome, I highly recommend trying it for yourself.