Volume inconsistency: solve it with the clip gain/event gain tool

Hello and welcome to this week's article!

Today we are going to talk about an ongoing topic, the one of gain staging, and the problem we're going to tackle is the one of the volume inconsistency.

When recording an instrument with high dinamic excursion (mainly vocals, for example), the professional recording engineers usually make the signal pass through a minimum of processing to make sure it arrives in the daw in such an optimal condition that it will already sound decent and require less mixing/digital processing, and usually we're talking about a little bit of compression (just to shave off a couple of db to reduce the difference between the loudest and the quietest parts), a little bit of de-essing and a high pass filter to rolloff the unnecessary subsonics; this is usually done in hardware preamps or good mixing boards.

Unfortunately in the world of home recording a good hardware compressor is not always at hand, and the vocals are recorded directly in the input of the audio interface, and often the level of the interface is set in order not to clip, so the engineer asks to the singer "scream as loud as you can", adjusts the volume so that it doesn't clip and leave it like that for the whole recording session. 

This leads to a HUGE dynamic excursion, to the point that in the same track there will be parts inaudible (and invisible graphically) and others that will take all the headroom possible, and we will have to compress the s*** out of the track to obtain a little bit of consistency in volume, with the downside that when the compression is too strong it unavoidably will end up coloring/deteriorating our track a lot.

How to solve this problem? It's easy, with a tool called Clip Gain (in some DAW, for example in Pro Tools) or Event Gain (in Studio One):  it consists in cutting the track in sections with the same gain and adjusting them, by raising the parts that are too quiet and lowering those which are too loud in order to make them more consistent, so that when the track will hit the compressor it will do its job in a clean and pleasant way.

In order to change the event gain you need to click and hold the little square in the upper middle part of the event and drag it up or down to add or remove gain.

This operation belongs more to the Editing phase than to the mixing one, and it's somehow a bit boring and long, but believe me, if you arrive to the mixing phase with a volume that is consistent throughout the track before reaching the compressor, it will make a world of difference, also because riding the volume, which is something that was done before the existence of compression to keep the volume stable, is actually a cleaner way to set the right gain rather than compressing, and this is just a way to do it not in real time. 

I hope this was helpful!

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