Of the plethora of procedures that are online on gain staging, my favorite comes from Gregor Beyerle for Studio One. It's simple: I usually start by making the sound waves loosely about a third of the height of each track, then here comes Gregor's advice: highlight all the channels, go to the most involved part of the song, start playing and watch the master bus and move the input so that it averages around -12 or so. Sometimes I'll grab similar channels and average two clusters but mostly grabbing all of them works just fine. Digital has a lot more room to play with than analog which makes the so-called sweet spot of -17 less significant. The process is so quick and I always end up averaging about -4 to -6 in the master bus at the end of mixing the works. While mixing, my preference is the fewer tricks, the better...only what is actually needed. John