Eli5: What is gain (in sound and music production, amplifiers, etc)? How does gain alter a sound? What’s an example of how it sounds?

Question

Hi. I don’t really understand what gain is, in this context, but I’d really like it to know. How would you describe what it sounds like? Or what it does to the original sound? (An audio example would be good.)

Fyi, I have looked it up before, but I don’t really understand so far.

What does it mean if some amps are made to have a higher-gain sound? Why is that more suited to some types of music than others?

Ty. 🙏🏻🤗

In: Other

Answer 1

You are discussing two different versions of ‘gain’ here, so too solid them up…

In audio applications, gain is how much a signal needs to be boosted, and can be approximated to a volume control. So a low power guitar or microphone signal will need boosted in volume by an amplifier before it is large enough to power a speaker.

In the guitar world, ‘gain’ had also taken on a second meaning – back in the 60’s, guitarists discovered that if you ran the guitar amps really loudly, they would reach a point where the electronics would be being run beyond their normal limits and once they hit the threshold where they couldn’t make a signal louder, they would start to distort it instead.
Initially this was considered a bad thing – early artists evolving from acoustic to early electric instruments typically wanted to replicate the clean sound of an acoustic instrument, just louder, which any distortion ruined and made sounds worse.
When rock music was first developing however, this distortion was decided to be a good thing, and sounded great for the more raucous rock guitar playing.
While originally distortion came from rubbing an amp too hard, that means large volume levels, which are not always desirable, so distortion started being purposely designed into amps. Rather than having one preamp (a gain stage that amplified the small guitar signal to a level suitable to feed a second stage) into a power amp (a bigger amplifier that increases a low power preamp signal into the high power output needed to power a speaker), if you chain together multiple preamp stages, you can use the first to overdrive the second preamp stage so that it purposely distorts more.

A high gain guitar amp is traditionally one that used multiple high gain preamp stages to create a lot of distortion – think of the harsher, noisier distortion used in metal music. Nowadays ‘high gain’ is generally used to refer to an amp or pedal designed to produce a very distorted sound.