Improve your video’s sound with this simple trick.

There are many ways to improve your videos. Mastering your audio is one of them. You don’t have to be a professional to have a well-balanced sound, as following some basic tricks can help you along. In a previous blog, we’ve gone over some very standard issues you should look at before rendering your video, and here we’ll go over gain staging.

If you’ve got problems with one noise or another constantly clipping or distorting, then gain staging is probably the tactic for you. This technique allows you to get a strong sound, while also preserving the balance and dynamics.

Gain staging is a practice usually done by audio engineers, but for more budget minded video creators who are handling their own sound, it’s good to keep in mind.

How to Gain Stage

With the following four steps, you can be sure to get your sound exactly right in your video production. We’ve made it easy for you at Smartsound Cloud, and already have your audio set at appropriate levels. Just download one of our tracks, drag it in, and let the gain staging begin!

Record at the right volume

Make sure that in your mic setup, you’re not clipping. With most audio recorders, you can tell when you’re clipping by when the light turns red. If it turns yellow, you’ve still got the gain up too high. You only want to notch in the yellow every few times.

Do some experiments and see what volume you’re recording at with your gain. You’ll want the volume to hit around -18 dBFS for a good input. Test your microphone source and adjust the gain accordingly.

Don’t record too loudly, or “hot”. Beware that having the gain too high gives you less headroom to work with in editing and can make the ambient sounds too powerful as well. If you’ve recorded something with too low of a gain, then when you turn up the volume all those ambient sounds, or “the noise floor”, will also turn up. The trick is to find that perfect middle, which is -18 dBFS.

Add a VU Meter on your master audio

It’s not easy to tell relative volume, especially as it varies so much between system and system. In this previous blog, I brought up this very issue.

To understand the volume of your project, it’s best to use a VU Meter on the Master bus of your Mixer. Make sure to set your VU Meter to -18 dBFS. Presonus offers a FREE, reliable VU Meter plugin here.

Turn down everything

Turn down the volume sliders on everything. Only by setting everything to zero can you begin the mixing process properly and get a well-adjusted mix. Even if you think you had everything the way you wanted it as you went along, it’s likely that you’ve changed the outcome along the way.

The gain staging process really doesn’t take that long, so it’s worth going through it properly.

Track by track

Begin with your loudest track. If you’ve got explosions, this is where you’ll start. Otherwise, it’s possible what you’ll want the loudest as your dialogue. Listen to where your dialogue itself is the loudest (where people are shouting and such).

Remember your VU Meter? When you’ve found the loudest part of your loudest track, play it and bring up the track’s volume until the meter reads 0 dB.

Now go track by track and adjust the volume, using that first track as a reference. Make sure that the master never goes over 0 dBFS. By the end of this process, make sure that all of your tracks have the volume turned up appropriately, and none of the sliders have been left down. You’ll want everything sitting between 0 dB and -12 dB on the VU Meter.

Wrap Up

Gain staging is an important step in ensuring that you have a well-balanced audio. Nothing clips, nothing’s drowning out something else, and everything sits nicely in the audio spectrum. Just follow these tips to get the right balance.