There is so much confusing information on this topic online. So many videos with smug intros, insisting that it’s a critical practice, with a seemingly obligatory preamble on VU meters, how analog gear historically worked, and sweet spots.

Then, there’s an accomplished mixing engineer like Andrew Scheps saying, “I never gain stage, like, what is that? I have VCAs all over the session where I can change the gain structure in lots of different ways at any time.”

Last fall, I attended (via Zoom) one of Mastering.com’s “Fix the Mix Challenges”. In that session they simplified the gain staging process to:

I’m not necessarily sold one way or the other. I will say, when collaborating with someone where you’re sending tracks and different takes back and forth, gain staging really helps when I’d like to replace a track with a different take, but I want to reuse the plugin chain.