Hi, I’ve been lurking for a week or so and this is my first post. I’m completely new to hardware. I’ve created a few 4bar patterns and where I’ve copied them over and adjusted from there, levels are nicely balanced but between individual riffs I’ve been inconsistent. The demo patterns all flow nicely.
Now I know of the 2 ways to adjust track levels I’m sure I’ll get better but just wondering how you do it? I want to get away from using my PC, so not wanting to use metering software.
I just do it the manual way. Adjusting both knobs and balancing by ear. There’s probably a faster way but I’m used to it from using old gear that doesn’t have a work around.
You could try using the gain knob. It’s a bit of a radical idea, I know.
I’m scratching my head for that. I have lot of distortion with all tracks if they play all together. I’m thinking of lowing down the volume of each tracks, and puting more gains in the mix table (?), and having more room for mixing.
Thanks for the replies. Just wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing something and I wanted to introduce myself anyway.
Now that I know about the track gain alongside the vol/dist knob this won’t be a big issue. I might set up a pattern where each track is peaking at -12db as a kind of reference, but probably not necessary.
Lots of switching back and forth and ctrl-all. Also if make a bunch of patterns (like I have 32 for a mini-live set), at some point it’s just going to be super time consuming to get all perfectly level. That is where putting a compressor on the end comes in.
Thanks, what compressor do you use, out of interest? I’m going to pair cycles initially with a crave (maybe get a circuit mono station eventually) so I’m interested in working on getting a potential live rig together. Be interested to hear what you use, especially mixer and fx wise.
I don’t have a compressor for my synth stuff yet, but this might be worth checking out since it’s stereo. Maybe someone on here has more experience/better recs though. good luck. https://reverb.com/p/electro-harmonix-platform-stereo-compressor-slash-limiter
I didn’t buy something specifically for the purpose so I just use what I have around, which aren’t really ideal so I wouldn’t recommend them (for example a modded DBX 166, the compressors on my Line 6 multi-fx, the compressor on my mixer, etc).
I would look at the Really Nice Compressor for something compact and perfect for this. You aren’t really looking for color only to do the job of cleaning up levels that would take forever to do manually. Perfect use for a compressor.
Thanks guys. The electroharmonix is a bit expensive for me.
After lots of back n forth I’ve made my mind up to try the volca mix. It has a master comp and I’m hoping the channel low/high cuts will give some usable mild filtering. The aux send is stereo and I’ve just bought a patchblocks unit from eBay so I’m hoping that’ll give some nice lowfi (10 bit, 20khz) and delay/modulation send fx. If not I’ll probably get a mini kaoss pad 2s.
Just need to curb my material desires and really get into cycles now. It really is getting my creativity flowing again 
