You are correct, my Nodes were indeed set to Volume (guess it's my habit). However the method described of using some hidden drop down seemed really weird to me, because I don't ever remember doing that. I simply right-click on the Nodes line .. see image below. I had to sit down in front of it to do it so I remembered, it's just become habit here. Sorry I wasn't more helpful earlier on. I sometimes move projects between DAWs or locations (which can mean a different version of RB/PT) so I guess it's part of my work flow that once I use Nodes I make sure they are the common Volume Node other DAWs and locations will recognize.
And thanks for the compliment on my testing method. I gave it a little thought on how to most fairly test and not allow a different player/settings to affect the outcome.
I do not work here, but the benefits are still awesome Make your sound your own!
Thanks Rharv, During the course of the thread I finally saw the menu you show but I didn't look long enough to realize I could change the node type there. Your message got me to do a little experiment to see if it retains the node change and it does. Of course you already knew that :-) It comes back to my post about learning by experimenting. I believe we all do it a lot more experimental learning than we realize. I am think PGmusic may have changed the install default to volume where as my install default is gain. I say this because the video shows volume nodes so they may have realized having the video show volume nodes but the program default to gain nodes was causing confusion. People like Charlie can always change it to default to whatever is best for them. People like myself won't even know to look.
You are welcome regarding the compliment. The first time I read your post I was tired and I could not absorb it. Only when I came at it with a good sleep could I learn it and realize it was a good idea. I apologize if I seemed critical the first time.
The people on this forum are way ahead of me in a lot of areas. I thought I had learned a lot until I decided to get the posts send to my email which I look at often. I realized that most of the questions I didn't understand let alone being able to answer them. I tried to help with one but wasn't very helpful so I took myself off. I appreciate being able to ask a question if I get really stuck. I probably won't get that advanced. Most of my learning these days is guitar related.
I left myself a note for my monthly mix down sessions. Specifically.
Quote:
Think of (gain-nodes as track-gain-nodes) and (volume nodes as mix-volume-nodes). This will help you understand why their settings (are or are-not) written out to the .wav files in all the various ways possible (the ways jford did tests on + the File-save-as...).
Regarding the idea of listing all the different .wav file output results, my jam keeps me very busy and at present I don't really see the need to list them all so I may never do this. Maybe jford would want to some day since he has it almost 1/2 done already. It essentially would be a duplication of what he did but with a 2 way break down (a row-column grid) to show the difference between the save to .wav for the node types side by side and of course it would need to include "File - save-as". Some people may find this very useful. This is the kind of experiments I was doing when I was learning UNIX shell scripting inside out and backwards. If someone does this for the whole BIAB and RealBand manual I recommend applying to PGmusic for a job :-)
The thing is there is no gain control in a DAW. Gain is handled through the sound card. The gain mode was meant for midi tracks cc11. It's like that extra volume knob that has no purpose.
One way to think of the difference between volume (CC&) and gain (CC11) nodes is to visualize buckets.
Volume (CC7) is the equivalent of bucket size. I can have one quart, one gallon, three gallons, five or seven gallon buckets. In all cases the maximum amount of liquid I can pour into each bucket is limited by the size of the bucket. I can have one gallon of liquid but I will never fit all the liquid into the one quart bucket.
Gain (CC11) reflects the amount of liquid held inside a bucket. The amount of liquid inside a bucket can range between 0 for empty to 127 for full but the amount of liquid can not exceed the bucket's capacity when it is full.
Volume controls track level in a mix. Gain controls track dynamic level.
Thanks guys, you both confirmed one thing. I am way behind some of the people on this forum :-) Make that a ...lol. Silvertones is easy to accept even though I don't know the details. Jim yours I have to try again in the morning after some sleep :-) Below is how I understand it all.
Gain: I think of gain and volume as things from my electronics class in high school (not that I got all that far into electronics mind you). In my mind one feeds an input into the analog mixer and your gain is the first stage of amplification. If you set it to high the lights go from green to yellow then red and you get distortion (not good). So when I record a jam I tell them to play something fairly loud and I set it to clip into the yellow so I get a good signal without distortion. This signal is from my understanding the one that goes out to the USB drive I record with and then ends up going into RealBand. I have never used the compressor knobs. I am guessing if I hear distortion in a lot of recordings I should start using it. Maybe I should put compression on vocals.
Volume: Getting back to the Analog mixer the faders are the volume feeding into the mix. This is just another level of amplification (another amplifier stage) and it feeds to the master fader (I do not have right left sub master faders). The master fader once again is another level of a final stage amp that feeds to the amps in the power speakers. At all levels you do not want to feed too much signal into the next bigger amp in the chain.
So here is where I was unsure. So as I said in the gain Paragraph those gain amps had a parallel tap that feeds the 16 tracks (THE 16 .WAVE FILES). So I have to assume I have a fairly strong signal most times on those .wav files but not a distorted signal so I should have no need for the gain-nodes in RealBand (even if they did something that is but silvertones is saying they don't which makes it easier on the gray matter between my ears). So all I need to be concerned about is the volume for the mix in RealBand (the volume nodes). I just adjust things to make the mix sound good to my ear. In the end if it all sounds pretty good to my ear then I guess that is all that matters :-) Ignorance is bliss I guess :-)
Yes. Too high causes distortion. Too little gain is also bad because it can allow the noise floor to become audible in your mix. The noise floor is the hiss, hum, buzz, clicks, pops and crackles generated from your hardware, electrical noise and equipment attached to the signal chain. It is inherent in every mix. The noise floor is one reason why adding a high pass filter to a track almost always improves the sound quality of your recording even if you do nothing else. If you hear distortion, don't compress, correct the gain.
<<< Volume: Faders are just another level of amplification (another amplifier stage) and it feeds to the master fader.>>>
Not exactly. First, a fader does not always amplify the signal. Faders can also decrease signal level or have no effect what so ever on the signal level. A better understanding of mixer faders are they balance the levels between the different tracks while at the same time, setting the optimum signal path level for the track. The numbers and markers on a fader track are very important to indicate what the fader is doing, amplifying or decreasing level or having no effect on the signal and to what degree and intensity that effect is. -0- or -U- is unity which means the fader has no effect on the audio signal passing through that channel. Notice also that channel unity is not located at the extreme top of the channel but around 3/4 of the fader run. The area above and just below the unity mark is your headroom and by design, the best area for your faders to be set on a mix. Gain is adjusted to avoid extreme settings of the faders. Where the audio signal travels from the fader is determined by your mixer routing. There are many places on a mixer to tap into the signal chain. This is what the terms pre-fader and post-fader refer to, tap point to reroute the audio signal. Every component, plugs, jacks, cables, hardware, Fx devices, amplifiers, knobs and faders have an effect on the audio signal quality. It can be so small it's inaudible or it can be a loud hum or buzz. No matter, it's all cumulative. Devices that can add or decrease the audio signal level should be adjusted most times as close to unity as possible so as to not add or decrease the signal but to maintain its level near unity which is neither increasing or decreasing. Unity on a mixer is by design the point of maintaining the most accurate original quality of the audio signal. Increasing the volume level or decreasing the volume level is also cumulative. Varying the signal between devices and across routing degrades the signal. Proper gain staging in any DAW or mixer is important to help maintain a proper balance between tracks and also for each individual tracks so the fader can be set within an acceptable range near unity where the signal path is in its ideal or closest to ideal location. With that said, you are correct thinking if the mix sounds good to your ears, that's what matters most.
Thanks Charlie, your post is very useful. I am copying this one to a different location (my checklist before a jam exactly where I have a note to run all the PA equipment of the same power to avoid ground loops - red highlighting things I have not been doing or had wrong). Regards, John
My biggest issue with the jams at the moment is the USB drive used to record the 16 tracks out of the mixer. It has a separate power supply as recommended in the Mixer manual. I noticed that during the mixer test of the drive instead of being high speed it is now recording as medium (good enough). During that jam it was fine. However during the last jam it was cutting out big chunks of the recordings on some of the earlier songs (the first 5 or so songs of the 13 songs recorded). It works fine for data backup. So I am thinking I will get another one the same but 100% dedicated to recording the jam only. The idea here is the final MP3 mix downs will be put on a different drive so that if the dedicated recording drive starts to skip or even have indication it is slowing down I will reformat it hoping that fixes the problem. Being dedicated nothing on it needs to be kept and the formatting will reduce the need for the read/write head to move that far giving it hopefully higher speed and less chance of skipping. I am thinking I won't even erase the old tracks since as soon as I erase tracks it will cause the head to start jumping around to free space. If I just keep adding tracks until it is very close to full that may reduce the number of times I have to do a format. After writing this last sentence it occurred to me that this may in fact be why it cut out on the earlier songs of the jam (Maybe once the write head laid down enough data it no longer needed to skip around to find locations to record on and it was able to record contiguous flow).
One way to think of the difference between volume (CC&) and gain (CC11) nodes is to visualize buckets.
Volume (CC7) is the equivalent of bucket size. I can have one quart, one gallon, three gallons, five or seven gallon buckets. In all cases the maximum amount of liquid I can pour into each bucket is limited by the size of the bucket. I can have one gallon of liquid but I will never fit all the liquid into the one quart bucket.
Gain (CC11) reflects the amount of liquid held inside a bucket. The amount of liquid inside a bucket can range between 0 for empty to 127 for full but the amount of liquid can not exceed the bucket's capacity when it is full.
Volume controls track level in a mix. Gain controls track dynamic level.
While all this is true I have also noticed RB using a different CC for Node GAIN changes than either CC7 or CC11 when viewed in the Event list. This setting may be something proprietary for RB when using the Gain option. Hopefully others see the same thing when using the Event List on a track where Gain Nodes are used (instead of Volume Nodes). The CC# appears as 102 instead of 7 or 11 .. at least here it does .. unless I'm doing it wrong, which has happened before!
I do not work here, but the benefits are still awesome Make your sound your own!
The MIDI standard leaves a lot of controller numbers "undefined".
Presently the following MIDI controllers are undefined: CC# 3, CC# 9, CC# 14, CC# 15, CC# 20 through CC# 31, CC# 35, CC# 41, CC# 46, CC# 47, CC# 52 through CC# 63, CC# 85 through CC# 90 and CC# 102 through CC# 119. That means of the 128 controller numbers 56, or almost 44 percent, are undefined.
PG Music has a good overview of MIDI and MIDI controllers available +++ HERE +++ .
Thanks for your midi overview link Jim. Due to lack of time I am not sure if I will ever get one but I have often thought I might get a Fishman TriplePlay Wireless Midi pickup system for recording my guitar solos (during the live jams which use BIAB) or (even during my practice while using BIAB). I could get the solo notation without having to transcribe. I think the software that comes with TriplePlay for doing this is called Progression (trying to verify that now). The biggest question I have about that is whether I can use the same computer for it as I am using for sending out the BIAB backing tracks. I have an I5 notebook running windows 7 pro. Maybe someone knows if this will work.
I remember CC#102 has previously come up in forum conversations. A search indicates PG Music changed how nodes works in the 2016 release. +++ HERE +++ is a conversation that indicates the CC# was changed from CC# 87 to CC# 102.
Bowlesj,
The Fishman Triple Play has consistently received excellent reviews since it was introduced. Midi data is transmitted from the guitar to a USB receiver over wi-fi. One forum user has about every MIDI tool invented and he likes it. The good: Latency (the time from when a string is plucked to when the audio is heard)is too small (way less than 10 milliseconds) to notice. It is pretty accurate. The bad: Cost ($399 US). Has to be installed on a guitar. Requires a computer.
Another solution is +++ Jam Orgin +++ . It also has received rave reviews. The good: No hardware, it is a software solution. It works with any program as a VSTi so any program that accepts VSTs can use it. Literally thousands of sounds and/or effects are built-in. Cost is $99 US.
I remember CC#102 has previously come up in forum conversations. A search indicates PG Music changed how nodes works in the 2016 release. +++ HERE +++ is a conversation that indicates the CC# was changed from CC# 87 to CC# 102.
Thanks for digging up the old thread. Good find.
Sometimes MIDI is more complicated than it needs to be. Even CC87 is undefined. At some point previous to this they were CC7 or 11, but that doesn't really matter now. Knowing they can be changed after the fact may still help some users. Data Filter for the win (again)!
I do not work here, but the benefits are still awesome Make your sound your own!
It was never was revealed if the current 2019 version of RealBand writes out the gain-node adjustments to the .wav file with "file, save-as". If it does not it would probably save PGmusic support costs if the program's "file save-as" routine detected gain node adjustments and gave a popup warning that it does not save the adjustments. It probably should be a popup that can be switched off. It probably should indicate how to change the node type and how to change the node type default as well. This idea is probably a better idea than my original suggestion of moving the drop down box from hits hidden location since some new users may not notice it.
It occurred to me that the above idea needs an adjustment. Specifically if the user wanted (volume nodes so they could get the adjustments out to the mix with "file save-as") the message is a bit late and they have to redo their work. So the message really needs to pop up when they place their first gain-node (only the first one during each new recording being worked on). This is the perfect time to save the user significant aggravation. And clearly this message needs to have a check box on it so the user can shut it off once they know. Since it would only popup on application of the first gain-node (during each new recording) it may be that they do not want it shut off (not that significant of an annoyance).
The biggest mistake that is clouding the issue is to compare a DAW to an analog or digital console. The first stage of amplification is the sound card.The gain stage is the sound card. Mo
I adjusted my prior post to indicate the popup should occur the first time adjusting gain nodes for each recording (not the first time one uses gain nodes). The shut it off checkbox removes the popup permanently unless a factory reset is run. Ideally that popup should point to some help for more info.
In my case I do not think I have had any track on any recording distort at all due to too much gain (too loud a track coming in from the disk drive to the computer). I am more likely to have too low a gain. However in this situation (once I get the main fader levels set to compensate) the quality is easily good enough for my needs. I won't be attempting to make money at this within any of my 9 lives :-) Using volume nodes solved my issue. As I prepare for my next mix session coming Monday or Tuesday I can't help remember the bad experience and Del's comment that others have had this experience with the 2017 version. Being a programmer/analyst solutions pop in my head. I am in a habit of writing all ideas down. This is the place to write these ideas.
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