I’m probably not alone when I say that I’ve never taken the time to properly understand gain staging, and this is especially true when it comes to my relationship with the Digitakt. I’m hoping someone here can help me correct that.
From what I can gather there are three places where the volume of my tracks gets adjusted. These are:
The track level on the source page
The volume level on the amp page
The track levels in my DAW (Ableton)
Now I wish I could say I have a current method to reference, but the truth is I’m completely all over the place, raising and lowering the volume in any three of those places at random until things sound “balanced”. And that’s not even taking in to account the overdrive parameter, or how loud I have the volume on my laptop. It’s that bad.
Would the correct way to approach this be to turn all of the levels up as much as possible in the Digitakt before they clip, with my Ableton tracks all being set to zero? If so, what exactly is the different between the “volume” and “level” parameters in the Digitakt, and where should they sit? I know that with my Virus the manual said to turn the synth itself up as much as possible without clipping then go from there, but I have a feeling this won’t be that simple.
Every analog gain stage has the potential to introduce noise into a signal. At unity gain, any given analog stage will not be adding much noise (generally, unless it is a noisey stage). Once you boost, it will raise the noise floor of the previous stage, as well as add it’s own noise into the mix, and eventually, its distortion curve, if any. With digital (at 24 bit at least) the noise floor is -144dB, which is so low as to not be a real issue with boosts of up to 48dB really.
I think, within the digitakt, it’s all digital until the final output. So you really you have only two noise floors to worry about, the noise floor of your sampled source, and that of that analog out. If using overbridge, then it’s just that first one really. Aside from that, clipping the digital path is your only worry. It matters zero where you adjust the gain in the digital realm (unless there is analog modeling going on) as long as you don’t go above 0dBfs at any point.
I think you are doing fine. If you don’t hear audible clipping, it really won’t matter where you boost on the DT itself. The overdrive is the only gain stage where one would be introducing gain-based distortion into the signal, that and the master compressor obviously. Adjust both to taste to get the dirt you want. All the other stages should be pretty clean and interchangeable.
edit: usually I have the volume on the AMP page for motion sequencing, the volume on the SRC page for overall set-and-forget volume mixing, the track level for manual fade ins/outs (accesible on all pages!) and the velocity seldomly for retrigger animations.
But I have no idea if that‘s in any way optimized for noise or whatever – I‘ve read somewhere that SRC volume interacts with bitreduction and overdrive.
Changing the levels pre filter seems to effect the frequency response on the resonance of the filter (or maybe this just prevents filter distortion?), so if you want more acidy squelchy you want to turn down the sample prefilter, the volume after the filter is good for taming the overdrive… atleast that’s how I manage it.
