Hello. First of all I want to say sorry for asking this and being so novice.
I am new in the world of making beats and I am trying to do "gain staging".
- I add the meter to the Master.
- I set Kick, Snare, Hi-Hats to -10 Peak.
- I do all the process with every drum. (everything to -10 Peak)
But then, when I hear everything together I notice the meter is over -10.
Is that OK or I did a mistake?
Do I have to create a Drum bus and route everything there and then modify the gain... again?
I'm so confused.
Thank you for reading.

 

This is called "learning healthy gain-staging" and ought to be the first thing one learns. You have to pull them down further in order to not clip the master. The master is the sum of all your channels and busses. If you have many channels, the lower they will generally be. If you only have two channels, they will have higher fader volume.
https://www.izotope.com/en/learn/gain-staging-what-it-is-and-how-to-do-it.html

Gain-staging happens from recording of a mic to the last level setting during mastering. You gain the input and output of all plugins properly/"healthy". Make sure all your channels have some headroom (distance between peak and 0dB), as well as on your mix bus (even if your DAW's internal processing is 32bit floating point which has like 1528dB of dynamic range).

Also, hihats at -10dB peak is a lot louder than a kick at -10dB peak. That's another subject (energy, psychoacoustics, equal loudness curve, etc). You will get there later. Start with the link I posted.

 

Last edited: Jan 10, 2023

just keep adjusting stuff until you figure it out. you will be constantly adjusting gain, unless you work quietly.

 

Well the hi-hats doesn't like being with the other drums.
So, I found a trick out there to mix them better.
- Meanwhile I set Kick and Snare to -10, I set hi-hats to -15
- I add some Tape saturation to the hi-hats.
- Tweak the outpot.
- Add a Gain plugin.
- Everything punches in the right level now.

 

Is it OK for the blind to lead the blind?
Great!
And use a buss channel as a "sub-master" and send all drums there to adjust with other parts.
There are different terms for grouping channels together: submix, buss, group,etc, but the idea is the same. I like to use the term "sub" (for submix") because it is pretty generic and short in name.
So "Sub 1" or "s1" or maybe even "d.sub.1" (drum sub 1, if you might even have more than one drum sub...one might group all the toms in one sub to add a little more reverb,etc).

Sub channels are a great way to be able to mute parts of the mix, and of course adjust the levels.

 

Last edited: Jan 11, 2023

Why do young people love skulls so much in their images, avatars, library, disks?
Who scored this in their brain?

 

This is Off Topic, but perhaps the OP has this worked out, by their reply.

I personally wonder why some people love butts so much in their images, avatars, library, dis....
Oh wait. I know: Nature scored it in their brain!

 

So we found the answer by joint efforts ))))
The old generation was made by nature.
The new generation was fried by marketers and developers of the viruses.

 

Last edited: Jan 11, 2023

*laughs in floatpoint-daw*
Sorry op, it just sickens me that there is so much software out there with a codebase from the nineties.
Why can I still clip any interface point within pro tools? at any point, be it insert, aux, bus, sum.
It's like having a studio in the eighties. "uh... did I run the 480 a little hot?"
Could software companies rewrite the engine at last every 30 years?
For what people pay to avid annually one could expect a floatpoint engine in 2023.
Gosh I hate Avid.
(PS: don't know about other daws, but if you're using cubase or nuendo, you don't have to gainstage.
you just have to come down to reasonable value below 0dbfs at the output)

 

Why do you want to make music? (or beats)