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Quiet Instruments: Cable Gain vs Tone 'Balance'
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Question
PianoLessons
My Background:
I've been playing RS2014 for about a year and a half. I've always found the default tone (as well as 95% of the stock song tones & DLC/CDLC tones) are very quiet. I spent a good amount of time messing with 'calibrating' to adjust the cable gain in-game, as well as adjusting the 'microphone volume' for the cable in windows settings.
I played RS2014 for about a year with the cable 'volume' at 70 or so (adjusted through windows), and generally with the background track mixed down to 10-20% of max volume. This is necessary just to clearly hear my instrument (Bass guitar, of which I've tried several different physical guitars during testing). During my research, it seems like this is what a lot of players had to do to be able to hear their instruments (Bass especially).
Once I started playing CDLC songs from Customsforge, I eventually ran into songs that had their tones SUPER LOUD, which in this context, means acceptably loud. I can play the song with the backing track's volume at 100% and still clearly hear my instrument. This loud tone doesn't necessary correlate to how loud the instrument is on the song's original mix. The only thing that correlates to how loud the tone will be while playing is what the tone's 'Balance' is set to (Tone Designer -> Edit tone -> Balance -> Options from -8 to +8). I ignored the 'Balance' setting for so long because I just assumed it had to do with the balance of the tone in the speaker channels. I don't know audio mixing/engineering nomenclature, but it seems like 'Balance' is really just a raw volume setting?
My Question:
How can I overwrite the 'Balance' of a song so that it permanently stays at a level that I like? Or, is there anyway to set the default 'Balance' globally? Even having the default RS2014 tone with a higher balance would be nice, as many CDLC songs don't use a custom tone.
It appears that an existing tone that is modified can only be saved as a new tone. If a song only has one tone used during its duration, this is acceptable, as I can modify the tone and save it to the 'Tone-stick' and change to this tone once the song starts. For songs with multiple tones, this process gets cumbersome.
I'm at the point where I play pretty much every song with the one or two tones that I've found to be acceptably loud (I saved those tones to the 'tone stick' and then select them once the song starts). All these tones are actually from CLDC songs by Tool, and they all have their balance at +4 to +8 (versus most other song's tones that are zero or negative).
It works, but there are situations where the tone clashes with the song being played (e.g. using a 'Tool' Bass tone in a Steely Dan song), or other situations where a song has a really unique tone and it only makes sense to use that tone.
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