…sort of a trick question, gain staging ALWAYS matters, but specifically does how hot you record your DI tracks matter?

First, just a quick general studio update – life’s been busy lately, but I think the bass tracks are done. I might go back and re-record parts of one, and I’ve got a 9th song that iI’m thinking of just adding into the mix and hoping a solo comes together before it’s time to record one, but of the eight songs I was planning on releasing, the seven with bass guitar have bass tracks. I’m planning on starting acoustic guitars next but despite my best intentions of writing a lot of music with acoustic in it this time around, there aren’t that many, so I’ll be moving on to rhythm guitars shortly. And, when I do, I want to make sure my reamping workflow is dialed in.

So, here we are. Gain staging is always a hot topic in audio circles and I’ve read a lot of back and forth lately on whether or not it was better to record your DIs as close to “unity” gain as possible with no additional boosting, to replicate what the amp sees, or record them hot, so they require less boosting to send back to the amp, to lower the noise floor. And, my only quibble with the Radial Reamp Station I grabbed recently was that it doesn’t really give you a pre-defined “unity” output level, and instead the manual says just turn it up until it sounds good. Which, on one hand, is of course correct… but om the other ins’t necessarily helpful, so this was also just a good opportunity to sit down and spend some time figuring out what that level actually is.

So, without further ado, a video. Commentary below:

First off – while experimenting a little when I first got this, playing back DI tracks then flipping the Reamp out to the Thru Out and playing my guitar through it, I’d figured “unity” was probably close to 3/4 of the Level knob’s throw. Nope – the still image above gives this away a little but I actually found that for a “unity” signal DI, turning it all the way up was the point where I could no longer tell the difference at all between a recording through the Thru Out (or, a recording straight into the amp, though slightly different performances were a variable there) and a reamp of the DI recorded with no gain boost at my interface (I ran straight into a mic input on my Apogee while doing this; I guess that’s a second quibble, because the unit runs on phantom power, you need to plug it into a mic input and not a line input, so you do have a mic pre as a possible (slight, at these levels) source of coloration). So, this experiment was worth it for that insight alone; it turns out when I’ve been reamping my demo tracks, I’ve been doing it too quietly.

Second, as far as the actual boosting… I was actually surprised how quickly I could get an input to clip with a Stratocaster. singlecoils are very dynamic… but still, an input boost of anything higher than 10 on my Apogee’s 0-75 front panel scale (presumably, +10db, but I haven’t pulled out the manual to confirm) was enough to get a track clip indicator to flash. Getting a perfect volume match on the other end proved a little harder – I made slight tweaks, recorded, listened back, made more slight tweaks, etc until I had a Level setting that yielded guitar tracks I couldn’t audibly distinguish and – I’m not sure how reliable this is, given that we’re working off a DI of the same performance – when I threw the reamped tracks out of phase with the original thru tracks, I had almost completely inaudible fizz left behind (I got the same results with the unity gain tracks when I tried – there was almost nothing left, which makes me think it was a very, very close match).

And third, the results… Please listen and come to your own conclusions. But, to me, I couldn’t hear a lick of difference between any of them. I was a little concerned that maybe the Reamp Station was degrading my tone a little and that somehow my guitar tone would be better if I plugged straight into the amp, rather than recording DIs and then sending them back to the amp later on. This was probably a well-founded fear, given the fact I’d been setting the Level control too low, I learned from this project… But now that I’ve got it right, zero difference that I can tell. It’s possible this is another one of those areas in recording where differences can be inaudible on a single track but stack over time… But, I doubt that.

Intuitively, I’m not sure I think the gain staging argument makes sense here. If the reason you want to record as hot as you can is to limit the need to add gain when sending it back to the amp, well, it’s not the guitar’s self-noise that’s the concern (since in either case it’s being captured and amplified, either by a mic pre or the Reamp Station, but at some point along the way the same amount of gain processing is happening). Rather, recording hot is basically a bet that your mic preamps have less self-noise than the Reamp Station’s Level control. That’s certainly possible, but in a dedicated “send a signal into a distorted amp” box like this which is tailor designed for the task, I’d have to think differences must be pretty slight.

I suppose you could make a case that “digital gain” is the way to go here, which is definitionally perfectly transparent, and maybe by just turning the track up in your DAW you do get a little bit of “free” volume at no gain staging cost beyond simply raising the guitar’s self-noisefloor (things like a Strat’s 60-cycle hum; that’s half the reason I used a Strat with singlecoils here, the rest of the reason being I just really like this guitar), but in that case you’d want to reduce analog gain in the signal path as much as you could anyway… which means no boost at the mic pre. The other possibility I didn’t consider until I was writing this was that the Level control could be an attenuation control rather than a boost, and it applies progressively smaller amounts of attenuation until you get to max. Even so, I’d think its still easier from a workflow standpoint to know that if you set it at Max, you get a signal hitting the front of your amp exactly as hot as the one you were hearing through the Thru output, while you were tracking.

So, in summary – I’m about to turn to guitars (maybe, I may start in on bass for a bonus song first), and when I do, I’ll be recording DIs with no additional boost on input. Doing so certainly wouldn’t hurt anything (although it might make getting my intended-in-the-moment levels of saturation right a little harder), but I’m confident that it also doesn’t appear to help anything either, and it’s one less variable to worry about down the road.