Hello folks please i want to know what actually should be a starting point as far as gain staging is concerned. I saw it on a certain forum that -18dbfs should be the acual level. Please can someone advice me and besides a friend of mine is having klanghelm SDRR distortation saturator plugin and he has recommended it for me. He is saying it works great on vocals. Any advice as well. Thank you.

 

Last edited: Jun 27, 2017

1. There is unlimited headroom in 32bit floating point Daw. Which all Daws are now a days.
2. You can't clip inside a Daw except for the masterbuss.
3. If plugins are written properly, which is true in all the case, you don't need to worry about clipping the plugins too. You just can't.
4. If it does not cross 0db on the masterbuss before it goes out to DA, you are fine.

The only thing you need to worry about are in the emulated analog plugins. They are calibrated in such a way that they made the "sweet spots" where the audio will sound best.
You can clip a analog plugin because that is how they are written, intentionally.

 

Use one of these at setting 18. Nothing in the red. Can't go wrong.

Also, if you over 32 bit audio you'll get 1 bit of undithered truncation to your audio resolution for every 6bDFS over 0 you go. So if you go +24dBFS over 0, you're recording on 21 bits of resolution. Don't go over. Use a Vu meter, or a Dorroughs.

 

Thank you, Mr. Plange, for the tip on using the Dorrough properly.

 

Last edited: Jul 10, 2017