Gain Staging Help Please!

[kieronbrown82uk]

Hi please help if you can. I am trying to resolve an issue i am having with gain staging on my Drum and Bass track I am working on. I have tried looking up tutorials on Youtube but I am definitely missing something. I am trying to grasp this concept throughout the production phase so I can leave enough headroom for mastering.

Senario:

1. Serum being used for the bass line

2. VST (SPAN) and Utility for gain being used to bring the signal down to -18db. Now i can't hear the sound come through my head phones. I don't have an audio interface so do I need one because my headphones are going directly into my Mac? Do i turn the gain up within serum? The sound signal is coming through as I can visually see it but can't hear it.

Many thanks for your help in advance

Kieron

[dsu]

Headphones plugged directly into the Mac make it very difficult to get the sound loud enough in your ears without having your mix levels very high. You are correct that using a audio interface will allow you to have a volume control for the headphones which can make it sound louder in you ears without raising the levels in the mix.

If you can't afford an audio interface at this time, one trick is you could put a limiter on the Master output and use it to turn up the gain instead of pushing the individual faders. This is only useful for the composition stage so you can hear the parts and get a feeling for the energy. Unfortunately to mix properly you need to be able to separate the levels in the mix from the "volume" in your ears. FWIW, lots of people recommend mixing a low volume levels.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khBw1TQOJUU

Good luck!

[jestermgee]

If you are using a clean bass signal with little/no harmonics then the issue could be as simple as your headphones do not have the dynamic range to play the notes of the Bass. Headphones are not really suitable at all for mixing low end since many do not offer detail and a sense of energy at the low ends. You kind of need a monitoring setup or some decent headphones. You can also look at adding some harmonics and making the signal a bit dirtier so it has some extra character. One trick I use to do when using headphones and trying to make the bassine fit and tune it a bit was to shift the whole bass track up an octave and produce that way then send it back down again when I was able to listen at a decent volume so I could level it.

[dylandigits]

i make low end-heavy stuff (jungle, dub, etc) in my headphones, directly plugged in to the macbook pro's headphone jack. i work at roughly 1/3 the available system volume because my aging ears get fatigued easily. my music sounds great on a loud system with good bass. so, it can be done. like any studio environment, it's about training your ears to know the limitations of your particular situation.

i currently use a pair of sennheiser hd 280 pro. in the past i've used sony mdr 7506. neither are top-of-the-line, but both are respected standards in studios, both can handle bass reproduction to a useful frequency depth, and i know them well.

what headphones are you using? that's a key element in this discussion that would be helpful to know.