The Gain Node is a simple Node that changes the gain level (volume) of an audio signal. In technical terms, it simply multiplies each sample in the source audio signal (or control signal), increasing or decreasing the signal’s amplitude.
This is one of the simplest effects in audio signal processing.
Inputs
Audio Input
An audio signal (or control signal) to change.
Gain-Control Input
A control signal to automate the Gain setting. You can toggle this input from the Node properties panel (it’s not enabled by default). You can also connect an audio signal to this input, but only mono sources are supported. If you connect a multi-channel audio signal, it’s automatically downmixed to mono.
Note: while the Gain Node’s UI only allows setting the gain between 0 and 2, this input accepts any value in its control signal. This can result in extremely loud audio, if care is not taken.
Settings
Gain
The gain change (or volume change) to apply, as a multiplier. That is, a value of 1 results in no change, a value of 0.5 reduces gain (or volume) by half, and a value of 2.0 doubles the gain.
Boost
Convenience setting to further amplify output gain.
Mode
Specifies whether gain change will be interpreted as decibels or volume percent.
- Linear: gain change as volume percent
- Decibels: gain change as decibels
- Linear (clamped): gain change as volume percent, being clamped before processing (see the blogpost mentioning the clamp)
- Decibels (clamped): gain change as decibels, being clamped before processing
Outputs
Audio Output
The audio signal (or control signal) with the specified gain change applied.
Performance
In the desktop app (and some browsers for the web app), when the Gain setting is not controlled from an input, the Gain Node uses a form of constant folding: the gain change from multiple, directly connected Gain Nodes is merged before being applied to the audio signal, thus the actual signal multiplication is only performed once.
This means that, when you use multiple, non-controlled Gain Nodes in a sequence, the resulting effect chain has no additional processing cost compared to a single Gain Node.
Similar Nodes
- Multiply Node – multiples a signal the same way as the Gain Node, but its UI and input structure is specifically for multiplying a signal with another.
- Distortion Node – with a high Distortion setting, the Distortion Node often results in a gain increase