The signal chain is the path your sound takes when it is recorded. Plugging your microphone into a mixer and plugging the mixer into a recording device is a common signal chain. Signal chains can be very simple or quite complicated depending on your setup. Here are two key elements to understanding signal chains:

• Gain. This is the recording engineer's term for the volume or loudness of a signal. Every time you turn up a guitar amplifier, move a mixer's slider up, or turn up your headphones, you're adjusting gain.

• Gain stage. This is any device that changes the volume of a device. Mixers, microphone preamplifiers, and input level controls are all gain stages.

Gain and gain stages are critical to recording great signals. Every time your signal passes through a gain stage, it is affected. Excessive gain stages can introduce noise in your signal. So, the fewer gain stages the signal passes through, the better.

Gain stages are used to set the level of an instrument to a proper, full level without distortion. Distortion is caused by adding too much gain, causing overloading. It's possible to clip a sound in one gain stage and turn it down in the next, resulting in a terrible signal—a low volume signal that clips.

There is a credo shared by many in the recording business: Garbage in, garbage out. If any part of your signal chain is weak, that weakness will come out in the recording. Bad microphones will still sound bad when played back on expensive recording systems. Noisy crackling cables will crackle on the recording. Clip an input and it will be clipped in the recording. Recording isn't a magic wand that magically cures problems. There certainly are some tricks of the trade, but you get what you put into it. Recording is very honest: Whatever you give it, it spits back at you.