emusonacid!

Is it possible to get your sampled breaks as loud as other sounds in your emu. it seems to me that all my instruments are at like 30 or 40 and my drums are full blast. and that is just to try to get the drums audiable. I usually set my breaks as mono, and then normalize, but they are never as loud as anything else, and that is causing a problem because when i go to record my track in cubase, i have a low signal to noise ratio on my drum tracks.

any suggestions?

thanks

snh

have u checked the velocity is at sumthing sensible on drum tracks and ur headroom/output boost(master) is suitable for ur material?

I don't know.

I do know that my sampled test tones are loud enough to floor me, but when i sample a break it tends to be quiter.

See the problem i am having is, when i go to record the track i am working on, my drums and some of my other sampled sounds don't come out very loud, so my signal to noise ratio is low. I want it to be as high as possible. So you think boosting the out put, and perhpas turning the volume pot all the way up would help?

just irrated a bit, i spend all night recording my new song just to find it sounded like it was recorded on a worn out reel to reel.

well i guess i will just have to play around with it and see what happens. if you have any suggestions though, i am all ears.

snh

it might be worth trying some different settings in normalise if you haven't already. I think you can specify a gain amount or something...

Doncha run your drums thru a desk then gain em on each channel to turn on the heat.. ? Sounds better anyway doing this, plus u get EQ.

BTW Recording to software like Cubase and mixing the audio is gona flatten out your drums dynamics so maybe this is why your hearing your drums sounding a little softer.

Mix in a analog desk if u can man, it makes a huge difference then record the 2-mix to your Pro Tools Mac and then burn to disk.

hey man, remember that those "test tones" for whatever reason, are ridiculously loud so don't worry if other sampled noises don't match up in levels.

i'm sure you've tried this but make sure your levels are up as close to the end of the record meter without clipping. on several instances when i was sampling tones from certain keyboards or drums from modules, i'd have to boost the gain up by about 15db or so (in the sample menu) prior to recording in order to get the noises to be loud enough with my other samples that i have on there. and even then in some instances i find myself editing the voice and boosting the master gain (under preset edit menu?) for noises that are still low.

i know this is really simple but the input gain in the sampling menu can do wonders for noises that aren't being recorded loud enough. if one were to hypothetically sample some drums but the meter were to only reach say 45% in the process of recording, and then normalize, it's still could be low and you would definitely need boost up the gain with the non-destructive gain in voice/preset edit. however it's ideal to get this stuff sorted out at the time of sampling so you are not going back and just jacking up levels endlessly resulting in unnecessary noise and screwing with the ratio.

so i would recommend going back and resampling a copy of a particular break you use and try altering the settings / making sure levels are pumping loud enough and see what happens.

thanks for all the advice guys. I am going to have to play around with settings and try to get things louder. It is incredible how much louder my "test tone patches" are when compared to something else. I did however get my recordings over to cubase much louder. I had used the 12 db boost and also turned my sampler up full blast. so now i have about 70 db of room. cubase says my noise floor when i recorded my stuff from my sampler is at about -70 db. I actualy checked sections with "no signal" and found a lot of crap there. I did get my recordings as close to 0 as i could. but i still want my samples to be louder to try to get more seperation from the noise floor. I will have to play around.

thanks for all the advice once again. every day it is a learning experiance.

yeah gain on an outboard mixer will help

also, 0db is not really 0db in an emu. I dunno, I can turn the gain up to about +10db (in the normalize section) and not hear clipping, just a hotter sound.

madmax wrote:yeah gain on an outboard mixer will help

also, 0db is not really 0db in an emu. I dunno, I can turn the gain up to about +10db (in the normalize section) and not hear clipping, just a hotter sound.

i will have to try this, been getting some slightly small waveforms on soundcard PC bounce from full vol/vel out of the Emu.

Got a desk sitting here being installed in less than a week! thank god for gain!

What does the gain actually do to it? raise all frequencies by the same amount?

Gain (on an analogue mixer) saturates/distorts the signal. Think of the soundwave getting louder within a set amount of headroom and what that would do to the wave as it approaches the maximum (soft clip at the extremes). It's actually one of the most difficult concepts IMO. I started out not really paying attention to them at all. Then I went through a phaze where I ran everything as hot as possible without redlining. Now I've learned which sounds are better "cooly" treated and which ones are best redlined and then resampled and run as hot as possible without the redline. Anyweah, I'm rambling again

edit: so basically I *think* that it will raise all freqs equal to a point when it approaches the redline and the signal starts getting squashed. When you redline it will also add higher order harmonics (as its basically being used as distortion). Hope this helps ..

madmax wrote:Gain (on an analogue mixer) saturates/distorts the signal. Think of the soundwave getting louder within a set amount of headroom and what that would do to the wave as it approaches the maximum (soft clip at the extremes). It's actually one of the most difficult concepts IMO. I started out not really paying attention to them at all. Then I went through a phaze where I ran everything as hot as possible without redlining. Now I've learned which sounds are better "cooly" treated and which ones are best redlined and then resampled and run as hot as possible without the redline. Anyweah, I'm rambling again

edit: so basically I *think* that it will raise all freqs equal to a point when it approaches the redline and the signal starts getting squashed. When you redline it will also add higher order harmonics (as its basically being used as distortion). Hope this helps ..

yeah i get it! all cleared up, cheers!