Gain staging help

[Marcello]

Hi there,

so I have my guitars track clipping a bit over -6db, I already did gain staging at the beginning without plugin and kept it at -18/-6db, but then adding the plugin it goes over it.  
now what should I do?

1- low down faders volume ( apparently this is just tricking, the wave form will remain the same anyway, not good.)

2- low down the gain on top of fader (already at -6 gain, decreasing this will take out the gain from the distortion modifying the guitar sound I need, I want it quite distorted, in plugin THU gain is already st max)

3- low down the output volume in the THU plugin ( then I would need to low down the volume of the rest, clean guitars, drums and bass to keep the dynamics, but the overall song volume is already very low, I can barely hear the song playing having the masterbus at 0 volume)

4- other options?

What do you suggest?

[CJ Jacobson]

3 hours ago, Marcello said:

so I have my guitars track clipping a bit over -6db, I already did gain staging at the beginning without plugin and kept it at -18/-6db, but then adding the plugin it goes over it.  
now what should I do?

You can do what ever works best for you and the sound. what you do depends on if you like the sound or not.

You can lower the fader or lower the plugins input or output or both or all the above.

3 hours ago, Marcello said:

1- low down faders volume ( apparently this is just tricking, the wave form will remain the same anyway, not good.)

Why do you say its not good? did you try it and di the sound change so much you didn't like it? Lowering the faders doesn't trick anything. It just lowers the track dB levels at the track level. There is no trickory here. Its black and white. If you lower a fader, you raise the volume and dB. the reverse happens when you lower a volume.  

Lets say you have a 40 tracks project, the faders on all the tracks will have to be lower than a project with 20 tracks. That is math, not trickery.

 

Just to sum up, you lower what ever gets you your desired sound. There are no right or wrong ways as long as you get the sound you want in the end,.

[Marcello]

36 minutes ago, CJ Jacobson said:

You can do what ever works best for you and the sound. what you do depends on if you like the sound or not.

You can lower the fader or lower the plugins input or output or both or all the above.

Why do you say its not good? did you try it and di the sound change so much you didn't like it? Lowering the faders doesn't trick anything. It just lowers the track dB levels at the track level. There is no trickory here. Its black and white. If you lower a fader, you raise the volume and dB. the reverse happens when you lower a volume.  

Lets say you have a 40 tracks project, the faders on all the tracks will have to be lower than a project with 20 tracks. That is math, not trickery.

 

Just to sum up, you lower what ever gets you your desired sound. There are no right or wrong ways as long as you get the sound you want in the end,.

Thanks just saw on LANDR QA, but it's refering to the master bus

 

"7. Don’t cheat

Have headroom in mind when you start your mix and keep your tracks at safe levels. If you’re finding yourself trying to recover headroom at the end, fine tune your individual track levels rather than reaching for your master fader and pulling it down.

 

Don’t cheat your way to -6 dBFS. If you’ve used plugins for the sake of loudness and your waveform is big, block-like and peaking at or near 0 dBFS – don’t take a shortcut by dragging your master fader down. You might think you created headroom because your peak level is now lower, but you’ve only squished your mix. For headroom to be beneficial to your mix, it needs to be arrived at in the right way."

[John Vere]

So that more or less answers your questions. But do you understand what they are saying?