Quiet Instruments: Cable Gain vs Tone 'Balance'

[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.

 

 

[PianoLessons]

I also noticed that the tones I've been using have a 'balance' set at 15, which is higher than you can even select with the in-game adjuster (-10 to +10)

[Alex360]

Bad tones within abnormal volume are common thing for customs, so I'd better like to adjust them other than official one, but I've got some odd feeling about rs2014 tone\song balance vs rs1 (i like it more since it's louder and I can clearly hear myself w\o extra adjustments)

and where you seen that high balance? if in tone designer then fine, you've got oldish customs with tone volume bug, if in toolkit then it's not what it is.

As for rs you may want to calibrate your guitar in tuner, so you adjust lvls of the input cable gain (can do it at cable settings manually too)
Make sure you've got good volume in other applications(try record yourself, your sustain must be pretty long w\o noisegate)
some people say that you need to adjust pickup height to satisfy rocksmith more and all would fall in place like it should, keep experimenting!

 

[PianoLessons]

Bad tones within abnormal volume are common thing for customs, so I'd better like to adjust them other than official one, but I've got some odd feeling about rs2014 tone\song balance vs rs1 (i like it more since it's louder and I can clearly hear myself w\o extra adjustments)

and where you seen that high balance? if in tone designer then fine, you've got oldish customs with tone volume bug, if in toolkit then it's not what it is.

 

As for rs you may want to calibrate your guitar in tuner, so you adjust lvls of the input cable gain (can do it at cable settings manually too)

Make sure you've got good volume in other applications(try record yourself, your sustain must be pretty long w\o noisegate)

some people say that you need to adjust pickup height to satisfy rocksmith more and all would fall in place like it should, keep experimenting!

 

 

 

- I see high balance in Tone Designer

- I don't know the age of my CDLC, never really paid attention to when they're created

- I'm still not 100% sure what "[the] tone volume bug" is

- Even with Cable Gain Maxed (which sets the Windows 'Recording Volume' to 100%), my instruments volume is still pretty quiet with the default tone or with the tone(s) used for stock RS2014 songs.

- With Cable Gain maxed, open E is terribly buzzy/bad sounding.