Hi all,
I’ve been using GP for just a few months now, and I’m impressed about the functionality, even as a former Forte user!!
Anyway, I’ve had some discussion with our FoH guy (we call him Herrie-Henk) about the different sound levels coming from the vst’s, especially when comparing to my motif (es8), hammond (xk2), and Roland (V XT).
I’ve was thinking about starting with aligning the ouputs of the vst’s (which follow one stereo out to the FoH), and was wondering: how do you all do this when playing live?
How do you make sure all the levels are more or less equally directed out to the FoH, without having them to do live-mixing the synth levels on the fly?
I’m using the V-collection, NI session horns, and the Korg legacy bundle. And especially the horns are most of the time lacking in presence, unfortunately.
I’ve thought of maybe have some meters visualising the outputs of each synth in GP, but haven’t quite worked that out, yet.
I am using Vst only and no hardware synth.
Important is that the sounds within a rackspace are volume aligned to each other.
In every rackspace I am using a widget to control a gain before the physical out.
Then with this widget i set the master volume to the desired level and make sure that the level between each rackspace is aligned.
Just before the master widget I am using a bus compressor which acts as a leveller - but this is just a matter of taste because the compressor is not working „brutal“
And important: Do not trust levels, trust you ears.
An example: Somestime the levels are very high, but the sound is not the loud.
This can be caused by to much low frequencies.
On the other side levels are not that high but the sound is too loud.
This can be caused by too much mids and no enough low frequencies.
Hi PianoPaul,
That’s right! I totally heard that last band session, where my horns were totally blocked out by the guitars… So I thought some frequency cloudiness (is that a correct phrase?) could be the issue.
The problem is that I can set everything “correct” by ear, but when with the band everything seems totally different.
But good suggestion about the gain and compressor widgets. I’ll test those out!
This is normal — when you have multiple instruments you have to pay attention to the frequency range of each instrument, often limiting such range to prevent muddiness (what you called frequency cloudiness).
For example, an acoustic guitar set up to sound wonderful by itself will be a disaster when other instruments are around it. Similarly, an acoustic guitar going through the appropriate EQ to limit its range will sound terrible in isolation.