Gain Staging with Slate VCC...im confused.

[KevinB85]

Background:
i do personal recording at home (mostly rock) and primarily use direct guitar modeling (Revalver), direct bass guitar (Sansamp BDDI), and drum VSTi's (SSD4) in Reaper. I'm more a musician than engineer so my knowledge of levels and gain staging is limited (despite reading a decent amount of popular threads on the subject).


Once i started tracking and mixing with my tracks peaking at ~-18dbs in Reaper, the results sounded pretty good. Then i purchased Slate VCC, this was months ago and i still don't think i know how to use it properly. I have never used a console in my life and 95% of my recording experience has been digital (the other 5% done on a Tascam 4-Track, lol).

I am going to throw together a short instrumental simply for the sake of mixing practice and learning to use VCC. Assume i have a full midi drum track ready to go and have multi-outed SSD 4 to Reaper.

-My first idea is to go into SSD's built-in mixer and set the faders so that each drum mic peaks at ~-18db in REAPER.

-Next, i apply VCC to each track and enable grouping. Upon playback (basic Kck/Sn,Hat beat), with the VCC input at +5 and Drive at +4, the VU meter is barely moving to -10 or so for each hit. Shouldn't it be peaking at 0?

-this is where i get lost. Once VCC is applyed do you mix solely by the VU meters in VCC and pay no mind to where REAPER's meters are peaking?

any volunteers willing to help me throughout the entire process when i need it? AIM or Skype me!

 

[crillemannen]

Didn't Slate say that the metering didn't work 100% correctly?

 

[up and at them]

You're confusing digital peak meters with a VU meter. If you're only peaking on a dbFS meter at -18, then yeah -10 on a VU meter sounds about right. VU is an averaging meter and this is where a lot of people get confused. Something like a snare could be clipping a dbFS meter but still not be at 0 on a VU meter. Something like guitar or bass, if it's heavily distorted or compressed , should be around 0VU = -18dbFS (depending on your converter).

 

[Nimvi]

You're confusing digital peak meters with a VU meter. If you're only peaking on a dbFS meter at -18, then yeah -10 on a VU meter sounds about right. VU is an averaging meter and this is where a lot of people get confused. Something like a snare could be clipping a dbFS meter but still not be at 0 on a VU meter. Something like guitar or bass, if it's heavily distorted or compressed , should be around 0VU = -18dbFS (depending on your converter).

Exactly. It's quite normal to have stuff peaking at -12 to -6dbFS, while the average is still around -18dbFS/0VU. Depends on the sourcetrack. Especially on extremely transient material (snaredrums for example), it can be hard to judge a VU meter, since the peak and the average level are probably miles apart.

EDIT: there was a pretty long thread about it a while ago. I think almost anything that could be said about the subject has been said there, so check it out if you have the time

 

[OneDaySky]

^^^ hell yeah! Nimvi helped me out with gain staging many months ago. Don't use your faders to get ýour input levels. Use input gain to adjust it to otherwise VCC won't work properly. Even if your fader is down, you should see that VCC will still be processing the input, meaning your inserts are pre fader, so basically the fader isn't changing anything in VCC but only the volume after it.

 

[mstone564]

Where do you all have your OH tracks sitting on the VU meter? If I use a trim plugin to get the majority of it at 0VU they're SUPER loud compared to the rest of the kit (which is at 0VU) and idk if that's normal.