While the instrument is playing or the vocalist is singing, adjust gain until the level meter next to the gain knob is consistently hitting the first couple of orange or yellow lights. You’ll need to do this for every instrument and every vocal, but it is really easy once you know what you are looking for. In other words, gain is the front door to your mixer, which is why it is so important to get it right, because it will affect everything else down the line. So, all your instruments and vocals are sending out a different flow of signal and you are going to use gain to regulate that flow so that everything is the same as it comes into the mixer. And the more you turn up gain, the more the valve opens, letting more signal through to the mixer.
When gain is turned all the way down, the valve is closed. And then right where you plug that cable into your mixer is a valve, kind of like a water faucet. To help this sink in, imagine that the cable that connects an instrument to the mixer is a water hose. Now it would be nice if all the instruments and vocals sent out the same level of signal, but they don’t… which is exactly why gain exists. The purpose of gain is to normalize the amount of signal coming from the device that’s plugged in to the mixer. But first, it’s important to understand why gain exists.
I am going to make it simple by showing you a simple strategy for setting gain that drastically improves the quality of your mix. Gain has this great purpose, but often gets mistaken as simply volume control. If the knobs on your mixer could talk, gain would definitely be throwing a fit about feeling misunderstood.