Syntakt gain staging/ headroom

Elektron Gear Syntakt
#1

Hi all. Apologies if this has been covered. I did a quick search with little success.
I’m putting a live set together using Syntakt as the interface for, and syncing to Ableton Live.
First question is when running stand-alone how hot do people run the track levels? Does Syntakt allow enough internal headroom that running 12 tracks plus effects will not introduce distortion, digital or harmonic, at the stereo outputs?
If so what kind of levels are people generally mixing track levels at?
Default is 100? So does that imply that 100 across the board is safe?

Thanks for reading.

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#2

Default level is 110 iirc. Unfortunately snap values are 0, 100, 127.

There is also AMP VOL, Velocity. If you set them all to 127 on 1 track, not sure it clips with default settings, but very little headroom. With several tracks, of course it’s risky.

Overdrive can change levels drastically, especially with analog drums tracks.

High resonance can cause clipping.

AFX routing can also increase levels.

I think the headroom is enough. I’d like a master level to increase all sometimes, because sometimes I have to set the Modern kick to max, and it’s not enough (clean and short kick settings, maybe I should use eq).

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#3

I alway run level to 127 on my Elektrons and then gain stage with Amp vol (or similar parameters depending on the box) … that way you can use level to fade tracks without ruining the gain staging…

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#4

This blew my mind. Of course, this is the way to go 🤦.

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#5

I ve been thinking about something like that for live sets with a midi controller to levels. Drawback of defaulting to 127 is that a track can’t be booster louder if necessary. Therefor I thought of defaulting to 110, or just going to amp level on the elektron box. Still need to try it out though.

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#6

Re: ST gain staging. One thing to keep in mind is that when routing tracks to the fx track the track level is the send level. It interacts with the overdrive. The louder the send the harder it can overdrive. Certain tones can’t be achieved with low track levels.

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