Gain staging?

Elektron Gear Monomachine
1

I hear this term being bandied about a lot with the Monomachine. I have an embarrassingly primitive grasp on what it really means. I understand this to be something like how a signal’s level is amplified or attenuated over the course of its flow from source to destination, which is probably one of the most important aspects of mixing.

Since this is used so often in context of the Monomachine, what does this mean specifically with it? Is this just a reference to the fact that you have 3 controls (DIST, VOL, and level) that you can use to control levels at different stages in the signal flow?

2

I saw the same words in another thread in this forum, and I have absolutely no idea what this could be! …

looking forward to a decent answer :stuck_out_tongue:

3

Ha, yeah, can someone nerd us out on this and then translate it into plain synth player speak

5

I would add Filter, Delay and LFO to that list.

Eg1. High LPF resonance boosting gain on low end.

Eg2. High delay feedback being controlled by a one-shot LFO envelope.

Basically there are many stages where Gain can be controlled.

Several parameters seem to be unuseable at their limits until you take this into account.

The most common trick is to reduce the DIST to -7 and raise the VOL to 127 to warm up the sound without changing the overall volume.

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6

Thanks for that ok I get it, great explanation

Monomachine gets pretty strange when you plock distortion, volume and eq and go a bit mad with it

7

Good explanations here. Long ago I wrote a post about this. Each channel of the MnM has muliple opportunities to control the overall volume. This allows you to create a high-intensity sound that is distorting and clipping all over the place and completely control it. For example:

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