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 :-)

John



Last edited by bowlesj; 04/18/19 05:44 PM.
John Bowles
My playing in my 20s:
https://www.reverbnation.com/johnbowles