Just venting some steam here… I’ve been spending a couple of hours in the last few days curating presets in the Triton Extreme VST, so I have a decent set of ready-to-use rompler sounds to get to results quickly.
And: it’s a paaaaaain…
Pretty much all presets are totally over-hyped sound-wise: boosts of up to 9 dB in the lows and piercing +8 dB in the highs on the master EQ in pretty much all presets. Makes them sound powerful and brilliant on their own when demo’ing the synth, but is completely useless in a band context, where you’re trying to fit into your sonic niche, not trample on the bassist or pierce the singers’ ears, and simply need stuff that “works”.
Then, the levels between presets vary broadly, even between sounds of the same category, like Hammond organ type sounds - variations of 12 dB and more between the quietest and the loudest patches, playing exactly the same pattern.
I can understand that sound technicians hate keyboarders…
And who the heck designs Hammond organ patches that are velocity sensitive???
And that’s Korg, who hired well-known sound designers like Skippy Lehmkuhl - whom I have a lot of respect for generally; he’s a wizard!
But it seems like sound designers focus on making a synth sound as “great” as possible in the store, so you go and buy the beast - then, when you put it on stage, techs hate you…
aaaaaargh - OK, no more excuses, back to EQ’ing and leveling…
I have an original DW-8000, still. I seem to remember that some sounds were at different levels than others, even then. I got the Extreme plugin with the Triton, but haven’t really seen much need to use it. I think the “Tube” portion was mostly about hype, anyway. I do understand the problem, I wish they were much more balanced in each preset.
The Triton has always been TOO quiet for me. I can barely hear them, even though I crank up all the parameters in the plug, and outside the plug.
I haven’t tried a preamp yet, but this is useless on stage.
If I make any progress, I will post here.
TBH, I’ve never had an absolute volume issue with my VSTi. I level them all against a VU meter to get to roughly 0 dB with a K-14 metering setting. I use the patch volume within the plugin to adjust, plus may add some Cantabile plugin gain within the rack state (state behavior activated for plugin gain) to boost to that level if a specific patch is too anemic.
No problem at all getting the Triton (Extreme) to this level using these two adjustment levers. It isn’t really significantly quieter than any other plugin.
Once all my patches are set to that target level, I’m in good shape to deliver consistent levels to the desk with reasonable headroom to allow for an occasional solo boost of around 4-6 dB.
If you have issues getting yourself heard against the rest of the band, this is probably more an issue of amplification rather than of plugin levels.
But of course equalization may be an issue in cutting through the mix - if a sound is wasting a lot of energy in the low end and doesn’t have enough presence, it will be difficult to hear in a busy mix, even though it sounds cool on its own. But it also doesn’t make sense to have everyone competing for space in the 1-4 kHz band, so just boosting presence on every instrument is similarly futile. Some assembly required…
