• Registered: 2020-03-10
  • Posts: 112

Topic: DI guitar levels and boosting them afterwards for amp sims

I'm capturing my electric guitar DI with a Neve RNDI into IN 1 of my FF400 and into Cubase.

I always have DIGICHECK up and I'm grabbing my DI anywhere between -21dbfs and -7dbfs depending on how hard I hit.

The recorded DI is crystal clear, no noise, sounds great, but "low" since we are so used to blasting our ears with HOT AS HELL SIGNALS.

With this DI signal in the DAW and then feeding any given amp sim, i can boost it with CLIP GAIN, with PRE-GAIN or I can raise the input of the VST amp sim. 

My question is if it makes more sense to just grab a hotter DI signal from the get go, or just keep doing what I am doing and use digital trims afterwards to raise the captured DI by 8db or 10dB to feed a hotter signal into the amp sim to really get the gain going?

2 Reply by ramses (edited by ramses 2020-07-14 07:28:33)

  • ramses
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Re: DI guitar levels and boosting them afterwards for amp sims

> grabbing my DI anywhere between -21dbfs and -7dbfs depending on how hard I hit

Its good if you record the dynamic of your guitar playing and if you preserve a little headroom not to distort at/over 0dB.

What would be the alternative ? To compress your signal to death already when recording ???
No, then the dynamic is lost.

And also remember ... the sum of all tracks in a DAW project add up to the volume on the mixbus ...
And finally you also need to reserve some headroom for the final mastering ...

From that perspective I do not see any issue..

BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13