ive posted before about Pi,
still having issue and want to see what the current meta is for gain staging
optimal input gain for bass,snares, and kick? or anything else you may deem important.
basically trying to find out how to make this plugin sound transparent which seems to be very difficult.
There are a few things worth looking into. Please make sure Pi is not inserted on any bus/group/master or auxiliary tracks. This may cause Pi to feedback internally and can also cause sync errors.
Preferably, Pi should be used on a post-fader insert. This way Pi will receive the actual level of the channel in the mix. Unfortunately, some DAW’s don’t have post-fader inserts. To overcome this limitation, we’ve included CHNL GAIN in Pi to allow setting the average gain for the channel.
The principle is the same for all source material (Bass/Kick/Snare and so on). If your Bass Guitar’s fader is at -10 db, set the Gain in Pi to -10db and the fader to 0dB. This way Pi will ‘hear’ the bass in its correct relative level within the mix. You can still use the fader and apply Automation. That’s it for gain staging.
Using Pi’s different Group Modes offers more flexibility in Pi’s behavior. Pi can perform two rounds of optimization in certain Group Modes. The various modes define how the rounds of optimization behave.
In Internal mode, Pi will only perform phase optimization of the tracks assigned to the group, without optimizing it to the mix.
In INT&MIX mode, Pi will perform a cycle of optimization of the tracks in the group first, then will optimize them as a group to the mix.
In PL mode, Pi will keep the phase within the tracks in the group locked and rotate all the tracks in that group at the same degree to the mix.
If a track is not assigned to a group, Pi will perform only one cycle of optimization to mix.
One more thing to experiment with is the Global Mode, switching between FR and LF and see which mode you prefer.
FR - Full Range. When set to this mode, Pi works to optimize phase relationships across the entire frequency range.
LF - Low Frequency. When set to this mode, Pi focuses on optimizing the phase relationships of frequencies below 800 Hz.
We’d be happy to review your project and offer any insight we may have, feel free to send it through wetransfer.com to [email protected]. If you have any questions, please let me know.
Thanks,
Oran