Where are you setting your input level?

sick pickle said:
I play Solar guitars and my sensitivity is very low like 5% or something and I still clip the red. It has direct mount pickups and I use very heavy strings for low tunings.
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I also play Solars but with DiMarzio D'Activator and Crunch Lab pickups at roughly 11 ohms each. Mine's at 90% and I've done the process as Mr Fender described and I'm not clipping the input by checking a recorded DI in the DAW. Still a bit confused why mine's so high though...?
 
Steven Persson said:
Really? :openmouth:

My guitar with Di Marzio D'Activators, which are supposed to be very hot, I have it set at 90% and I'm barely ticking the red. Also reading various other post with guitars with hot pickups making me think there's some serious wrong my end....
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I think the revision of the Majesty that I have has pickups that are very bassy, in addition to being hot in general. If I cut the bass out front with an OD pedal, the red tickling isn’t as frequent. That said, I think all of my humbucker-equipped guitars would be clipping like crazy with 90% input sensitivity, so I do find your experience interesting.
 
That's why I think it would be really beneficial if we had a visual indication of when the clipper actually kicks in before the A/D conversion. At the moment there's a lot of guesswork involved in making full use of the headroom without compressing/clipping the signal.

Added a thread to the wish list regarding this.
 
Brian Angiel said:
I think the revision of the Majesty that I have has pickups that are very bassy, in addition to being hot in general. If I cut the bass out front with an OD pedal, the red tickling isn’t as frequent. That said, I think all of my humbucker-equipped guitars would be clipping like crazy with 90% input sensitivity, so I do find your experience interesting.
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Yeah, on the other hand - my tones sounds perfectly good, but I also find it interesting why my input setting differ so much from others.
 
Sup? :)

Wow I'm doing this test with 2 guitars with Fishman Fluence moderns >>> AxeIII>> input 1 >>output 1>>>Spdif>>>> RME HDSP52/96. I have the input1/instrument at 0% the AES/Spdif at 0dB. my RME input meter says I'm averaging about -14 on constant chugga riffs with the hardest hitting at about -9.8. but the big jangling open d chord type stuff and the hardest downstrokes clips the waveform. before this, for reference,, I was at 70%, but there was a time about 10'ish firmware's ago,, I remember being at 15%...
hmmmm
gonna have to play with this more

MOSHON
DAVE
 
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Steven Persson said:
I also play Solars but with DiMarzio D'Activator and Crunch Lab pickups at roughly 11 ohms each. Mine's at 90% and I've done the process as Mr Fender described and I'm not clipping the input by checking a recorded DI in the DAW. Still a bit confused why mine's so high though...?
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DC resistance is not really the indicator of hot the output is. Pickup wire thickness, number of wraps, etc dictates the output level.
 
Just experimented with this. Now I'm confused. pick-ups low output PAF:7.23Kohm, 220mv, height: 2mm treble side, 2.5mm bass side (with strings fretted at 24th fret). Whacking the strings hard, will not tickle the red until about 75%-80%. So, I made a preset of shunts input 1 to output 1, shut off the gate and adjusted Input 1 A/D sens. The sound of the guitar gets audibly duller at higher settings (anything over 50%).Like the sound is being compressed. Lower settings (anything under 40%) sound livelier, with more highs and lows. Kind of like an expander is being used.

I am kind of preferring it around 30%, although that seems like a very low setting for these Pups.:confused:
 
Forgive my ignorance of the situation in this thread, but I was under the impression according to the wiki that the input sensitivity has no affect on sound unless it was under 5% and that the proper way to set it is by tickling the red LED occasionally on loudest hits, so it makes me wonder how there are reports of big changes happening sonically when changing this setting anywhere between 5% and tickling the red LED occasionally when it’s stated that this does not happen by the manufacturer? Tickling the red also means you have 6db of headroom before limiting, so unless you’re smashing the strings all the time causing the red LED to go off constantly, there shouldn't be a sonic change according to how the wiki reads.
 
GlennO said:
I would put it a little differently. If the red led lights up, you have exceeded -6dB and you might be clipping. It doesn’t tell you anything about how much headroom you have.
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Yes. This is just an indication really - a baseline - I trust my ears more.
For whatever reason my D'Activators behave similarly.
For comparison, 3 from my own, Fluence Open Core's least red led, then D'Activators and then most red was evident with USA EVH's. I'm set at 70%. Direct cable to front jack.
 
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mr_fender said:
DI = Direct Injection. It's a recording directly from the input with no processing at all. Record a signal from USB Inputs 5 and/or 6 to capture the signal directly from the Instrument input jack (Input 1).
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Or connect the Input block directly to the Output block on the grid.
 
EBMM Cutlass - 100%.
strandberg boden with fishman fluence - I think 50%.

I know most say to set it for your hottest guitar and live there, and that's what I did for a long time. But I've just been playing the cutlass recently so I decided to pump it up. Don't even come close to hitting red with the cutlass at 100%.
 
50% works for all my guitars (weak vintage strat thru hot JB pups).

Other than <5%, all sensitivity values that yield no digital clipping should sound the same - I don't understand how some hear differences short of clipping at >5% values.
 
GlennO said:
I would put it a little differently. If the red led lights up, you have exceeded -6dB and you might be clipping. It doesn’t tell you anything about how much headroom you have.
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Got ya! My point is if one is barely causing the red light to go off when actually attempting to make it go off purposely, chances are, if the signal does trigger the limiter with normal playing, I would greatly assume it’s a non issue, especially when the wiki states to set it up this way. But I can’t imagine that my loudest hits when barely causing the red to go off would happen to be a 7+db increase every time the red light goes off. :)
 
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