Level Up!

Pedalboards
#1

I’ve started using the Level Meter (under Beta in the store) liberally while setting up boards. It has been helpful to get a ‘better than nothing’ understanding of what the levels are like across the board, which plugins are changing the levels, and where I was losing headroom. Based on reading through other threads about gain staging, I’ve been arbitrarily trying to keep the signal between -18 to -10 across the board for regular to aggressive strumming.

I use the looper in front during building to keep a rhythm progression repeating so I can work on cutting and boosting with the EQ.

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Volume levels input / output
#2

yep… my boards are also littered with those meters during builds! :smiley:

it’s a bit cumbersome, having to zero them manually, but it works! i’d love an 8-channel visual meterbridge, with peak indicators that can be set to arbitrary hold times.

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#3

my one recommendation would be putting the Calf Multiband Limiter last in the chain (after your volume control - that way you’ll never overload the outputs. It’ll just squash it, and it’s imperceptible until it’s doing quite serious compression! Easily my favourite plugin, and gives me up to an extra 10dB on boards where I’m likely to spike things every now and again :slight_smile:

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#4

As @solobasssteve points out the Calf Multiband Limiter! , (not Compressor as stated before) plugin is like the swiss army knife of plugins.
When I was making my own presets for some synth plugins I looked at their harmonic content, though. I wanted to let my synth sounds to be bright enough to cut through but small enough not to cover up other instruments. Sometimes volume on stage just powers up if instruments play in the same frequency range.

Greetings and God bless,
Marius

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#5

…for clarity, I’m using the multi-band limiter, not compressor - largely because a limiter tends to be a little more transparent and I only want it to prevent overloading, not shape the dynamics in any other way… But given the extraordinary quality of the rest of the Calf plugins, I’m sure the compressor is brilliant :slight_smile:

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#6

Thank you @solobasssteve, I will work toward integrating that one. IIRC I’ve tried it before (based on other comments you’ve left) but abandoned it for two reasons:

  1. On an already CPU-heavy board it required too much CPU (anecdotal, may have been changing too many things at once)
  2. I didn’t know how changing the parameters would be affecting the output. Need a little reading and guidance in this area.
#7

https://calf-studio-gear.org/doc/Multiband%20Limiter.html

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