Hi, I'm Samia with American Music & Sound and I'm here today at BASSBOSS to talk about gain structure.

In today's conversation, I will navigate through setting virtual games and performance software, also setting gains and gain structure in your digital controller and mixer. And finally, we'll land on gain adjustment for your loudspeakers.

And in the end, for power users, I'll show you how to do some unique routing to provide independent control of main speaker output versus subwoofer speaker output.

As a DJ, I utilize Serato DJ Pro. In today's example, I'm going to be working off an older version of Serato, but the navigator and the adjustments will remain the same on occasion. When I load a new track into my library and then onto the virtual playing deck, Serato will do an analysis of key, BPM, and beat grid.

One thing to pay attention to in the higher output sections of your track is a virtual gain view meter. Oftentimes those gains with auto gain set fall into the top of green, peak into the yellow, and it's a quality clear clean signal. In some cases, when I import a track, I notice that it will be at the top of the yellow, orange into the red. And that track you can hear audible distortion.

With that in mind, one of my goals and how I look at my performances is about quality energy sound. And it's very important to start here with a clear, clean signal before it makes it to your hardware. I'm going to navigate through importing a track, playing that track, illustrating that view meter into a distortion red zone, and then how to correct that.

Once corrected, that gain adjustment in the software will save like metadata. So the next time that the track is recalled, you'll be good to go. So let's dive right in and I'm going to load a track to the left-hand virtual deck of Serato.

In this example, we're going to be focused on the view meter. And in order to get an accurate reading for doing a virtual gain adjustment, we want to navigate to a section of the track where the waveform is exhibiting some of its highest output. In this example, I have a cue point set. I will go ahead and navigate to that. I'll set a loop for eight bars and this allows a repeatable view of that particular output, which will also be helpful when we do hardware level gain adjustment. I will go ahead and play.

And now that the track is running, I'm looking at the view meters in the virtual gain right here. If you follow my cursor, we'll make an adjustment with this knob right here by bringing it counterclockwise and you'll notice I brought it down substantially. I'm going to bring it back up until the Greens just start touching the orange and that's going to leave me some headroom for additional peaks and spikes that I may not be aware of in that particular piece of music.

Once adjusted, I'll go ahead and stop the track and I will eject it. The reason for ejecting is I want to show you how it actually saves. So I'll go ahead and load that track one more time. I will navigate to that same cue point. I will initiate the track and you notice that the volume and the virtual gain are well in check. And it followed my adjustment.

Now that this has been completed, we're able to move forward into our hardware and start with track level gain adjustment, master output gain adjustment before we go on to our loudspeaker.

And now we're on our control surface. So our DJ hardware happens to be a four-channel controller. The center section is very similar to what you encounter in a mixer when you're stepping into any club venue and you're setting up either your own gear or coming on to existing gear. We'll go ahead and make sure that our mixer section is neutral.

Each channel we will look at the cues, bring those to their zero point, their 12:00 position. I like to bring my levels down on all four decks. We have our up faders in the down position right now. I have the cross fader neutralized. That will have zero impact now on our gain settings. Pitch faders are zeroed out, my sections are turned off, the master gain is at zero or turned all the way down and both outputs and alternate zone outputs are also turned out.

We'll focus first on adjusting the level output for your first channel gain. We have the same track with the same four eight-bar loop playing in a high output section of the waveform. And now we'll go ahead and bring up the level adjustment on this particular channel until we hit our zero DB point. This particular mixer does not have labeling for the DB point, but the master view meter output does. So if you look at the positioning, it's uniform. So the 0.4 the master output will be the same physical location for your channel.

As I bring up the level, we'll see activity on the view meter for this particular channel and I'll continue to raise that channel until I finally see some action in the three six DB peak. But for me more or less a constant zero DB strike. Once I have that channel gain set to my liking, I'll go ahead and bring up the master. I'll take my fader and move it to the up position. You notice that we don't have any audio playing. We have the loudspeakers turned down fully and that will allow us to do our gain adjustments without contending with a loud environment.

As we bring up our master gain, we'll see activity start to display on our view meter for our master out. We'll continue to raise that until we hit that zero point. I'm going to trim slightly on my first channel and I'm pretty happy with what I have engineered here. I prefer to come in at the zero point it allows me headroom physically here at the board, but also for variations in tracks. I have a lot of cushion. This will help maintain the best sound quality and also help protect the venue or your own system in order to unify your other channels for the evening. I'll go ahead as a starting point. I'll go ahead and gain out each one of these tracks. So it's as simple as loading that same track with the same loop in an instant double type format to your other decks. And we'll go ahead and make those same adjustments, bring up that meter, and we'll load it to our four deck. If you happen to have a four deck, you may as well get those dialed in and we will go over to our deck three and we'll bring that level up.

Now you can look across your board and make sure you're unified. So all four channels on the same track essentially have the same channel level output. The other reason I like to target zero, especially on the master, when you bring in another track, the combination of the two tracks will likely boost the master output. So again, it leaves you a room for error or a buffer. Go ahead and pause those decks. I flip back to my primary again, my master set. I'll bring up a fader and there we are.

Now we'll move on to our loudspeakers and show you my preferred method of setting the gains. And now we're here with two of my favorite speakers, the BASSBOSS SV and the BASSBOSS BB15. I absolutely love these because they are so easy to transport and they offer so much in terms of fidelity and output. This small package absolutely fills the room and does things that much larger speakers struggle to do without further ado, let's jump into signal routing and gain structure coming into the subwoofer.

We have a feed from our controller that we saw earlier. We have an excellent loop out to our main power in power loop and we're ready to rock. We have the gains turned down. I'll start with a little bit on my mains and I'm going to increase gain output on the subwoofer until I reach the desired level for the venue at the maximum that I would like to play during the evening. So peak hours peak point generate that highest SPL that I'm shooting for. We'll start here a little bit of volume, go here, bring it to where you'd like come back to your main, add this mid and high until you find the balance that you would like for the type of evening that you're going to have.

And you're done. So far. Advanced tips and tricks. I'm going to show you routing to be able to have discrete volume control of your subwoofer versus your main. I find it handy in certain events to have this level control. And if you're not deploying both monitors, you can use existing outputs on your DJ mixer controller to accomplish this task. If you're utilizing a board or a mixing console, you can utilize accents to separate these channels and have independent volume control. Some controllers even have an auxiliary zone output which will allow you to retain both monitors but also have discrete volume output in a differential.

So in this example, again, I have routing into our subwoofer from our master output. I have routing into our main from our booth output. Independent control knobs allow me to vary that volume between sub and main any time I want and any bias I want during the course of the evening in an event.