Input channels

Hi y'all
Im doing an online course with a recording studio designed to help us home recorders get better recordings.  we are covering a thing at present called Gain Staging and our instructor has advised not only to look at the output channels in your DAW for clipping, but also input channels. He reckons in a lot of DAWs this is hidden and has to be made visible.  Is this making sense to anyone?  I'm using the basic Sonar X2 Studio  (not producer etc). 
Thanks guys

You also have gain levels from instruments themselves, whether a guitar, external synth, or an internal soft synth.  All of these have levels too.
 
One thing you don't really want to do is to have added gain early, then reduced gain, then have to add gain again later.
 
Get your levels set all the way back to whatever the source is, then to the interface, then to the console in Sonar, etc.
 
I would suggest you search YouTube for the following terms (without the ' marks): 'input gain staging'
 
I hope that helps
 
Bob Bone