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Author Topic:   Any Tips on Balancing Sound Levels?
David McClain
Member 		posted 04 October 2000 21:27         Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote
I have a massive pad sound that I have created with up to 16 voices of polyphony, to allow new notes to play while the release stages of the previous notes continue to sound out. Of course, the more notes you play the louder the mix going into the post-filters and so on. Hence, quite often I have to back off the gain in the MIDI stage with a slider to compensate for how ever many voices I expect to use.

How do the other synth's manage this sort of gain balance. I don't recall ever having to jockey any gain controls on them to avoid overloading their filters. I don't want to incorporate compression if I can avoid it. Is there a way to scale the amplitude of a mix inversely with the number of voices currently sounding?

Thanks,

- DM

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David McClain
Member 		posted 05 October 2000 00:53         Edit/Delete Message   Reply w/Quote

peakreadout.kym
 
While not a solution to the variable number of voices problem, I found a way to add test-point readouts to various substructures of the Sound. Attached is my PeakReadout Sound. I added several copies of this to my grand Sound, viewing the peak excursions of the oscillator banks collected by the MidiVoice module, and various following mixers that collect post-processed sounds.

The PeakReadout uses a SoundToGlobalController that takes "20 * log([signal abs running-max] abs L vmax: [signal abs running-max] abs R)" and displays it on the control panel as a mini-fader (just a digital readout). I assume that I need to treat left and right channels this way, but I don't know for sure. I didn't want to do a "[sig...] M" for fear of phase cancellation, but that wouldn't be a problem after the abs function anyway...

These little peak meters allow me to monitor how close I get to clipping in each stage, and show me how to adjust the relative mixer gains, etc.

In general, if I know that N voices will be used, I use a MidiVoice gain of somewhat less than 1/N. I try to run the gains as hot as I can without clipping, trying to stay within -1 to -3 dBFS in each stage.

- DM

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