Tracker volume: best practices

Tracker
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I‘m curious how you guys handle volume control in your overall tracker workflow. The tracker has pretty comprehensive volume controls:

  1. Overall volume control of the tracker (page master 1/3)
  2. Saturation, hard clip, soft clip etc. (page master 1/3)
  3. Instrument volume parameter on first instrument page
  4. Volume amount on ADSR instrument page (last parameter)
  5. Overdrive effect (not really a volume control but rather an effect for sound design)
  6. Normalize sample as destructive effect
  7. Individual track fader in track mixer
  8. Dry mix fader in global mixer

What are your approaches and how do you usually control the volume of your instruments/samples to get a decent amount out of it but not clipping?

Do you set your tracker’s master volume to 0.00dB before getting into the headphones or your hardware mixer?

What is our usual saturation setting?

Unfortunately I have some background noise issues in most of my projects (genre mostly ambient/electronica) and I am wondering if I‘m misunderstanding the audio path or always working on too low volume overall :man_shrugging:

Thanks for your tips/ideas :pray:

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Hey @tomc1774, welcome to backstage! :partying_face:

That’s an interesting first question you bring before use, actually! :thinking:

I’m sure there’s a myriad of ways that others deal with this, so i’m just going to explain how i do it. It may work for you, it may not :joy:

First some of my personal defaults:

  • For 99% of my projects. i don’t touch the individual Track volumes AT ALL :laughing:.
    They stay at 0.00db
  • I personally nearly always use Saturate in the Saturation settings
  • I always add some space
  • Bass boost and EQ’ing usually happens somewhere down the line
  • Mastervolume is set to whatever is most comfortable to work with and will be tuned at the end when i want to record things into my DAW

Based on this, it should already be obvious that i do most of my mixing and volume control directly on the instruments.

As a basis my samples are either prepared outside of the tracker or generated within the tracker. If i prepare them outside of the Tracker i usually make sure they are already at a good volume (normalized). Internally rendered sample volumes depend on what i have rendered. Sometimes i normalize them, sometimes i just amplify them and sometimes it’s enough to just increase the instruments volume.

Most of all - i don’t want to think too much about it and i just go by ear.
Trust your ears, they will tell you if an instrument is too loud or sticks out too much.

It seems that this is a truth that “Big Mixing/Mastering” doesn’t want you to believe in :laughing:
Just go with your gut feeling and your ears. :blush:

Got an example of what that background noise sounds like? Or a project you could share so we could have a look on how you set things up? I’m sure that would help us to give some more focused tips. :muscle:

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Hey @Sandroid, thanks a lot for your kind welcome message and your time, really appreciate :pray:

Your approach makes totally sense to me, I will take your settings as a base and test and elaborate on them for myself. Actually I think, your hint to not focus too much on values and parameters but trust my ears is key. I mean, the tracker is so versatile and you can customize and use it in so many different ways and for all genres you can think of (not just jungle, hehe). That is one of its great benefits and the versatility and effort Polyend put into it is remarkable in my eyes. Anyhow, I just wanted to make sure that I do not use something so basic like volume in a “wrong“ way as it is intended, if that makes sense.

At first I thought it was a hardware issue, so I got into contact with the friendly Polyend support team, and they checked my device, shoutout to them for being so kind and fast. They investigated in it and came to the conclusion that the noise is within the normal range, so I think since it is not present in all of my projects it maybe has to do with either my handling of volumes on certains proejcts or my sample files? I don‘t know.

Long story short:
If you have the time you find an attached project where I was working on a simple dub techno line (based on a tutorial from the mighty Martin Stürtzer). You can find some noise in the beginning and end in the quiet areas if you listen closely, I also attached a wav:

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/k2pyd8x99wys97k701qrk/ABofijKxKMEHlnuPWrgnAsQ?rlkey=2b5am5h1hywzoekjiivkktlm1&st=1041jd67&dl=0

Thanks!

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