oh and I pronounce it “Sock-oh-loss-key” but I’m sure Polish speaking people would say I’m saying it wrong 😂

@@eds4754 I mean I totally botched the name so I'm sorry!! And THANKS for the intel - seems you've been really instrumental in getting that information out there at all!!

@@johnnathancordy You’re welcome! I was hoping someone with a big audience would share this information as I’m convinced almost nobody is using the intended levels, and has no idea there’s even an issue!

Behringer says that the UMC204HD has a Max. input level Mic: -4 dBu / Line: +20 dBu / Instrument: -3 dBu If i plug directly to the audio interface, "the rule" still is to have the input LOOOW on the behringer and compensate the input of the plugin, and finally, adjust the output of the plugin to the db level i want to hear from monitoring? The dBu thing is very confusing to me :-S

@@martiboucat -3dBu is almost no headroom. Use the pad (it’s 20dB) and you’ll be at 17dBu. Then leave input gain at 0 and boost in the plugin by 5dB

For 2 years I was using it on line... I always wondered why I couldn't get good guitar sounds lol. I only realized what was going on a month ago... fml.

​@codexnecro just how? Do people not look at controls before using them

@@lechug43 I did when I bought it, and at the time, from what I read I got the impression I was supposed to use Line in my case and I set it that way and never thought about it for quite a while.

It’s not just the gain, instrument mode increases the input impedance as well. This affects the overall level and frequency response.

What if you have a Radial J48 hooked up to the Focusrite? It’s at 10 plus maximum db?

it has

Offcourse, these interfaces and their makers are from a generation where plugins were only at the relative basic, from an marketing, business point of view alone, the company would have spend more budget on marketing and r&d geared towards vocals or recording tube amps with mics

Now with this in mind, I truly believe this was the case... In fact, let's go even further... plug-ins a few years ago weren't as great as they are today thanks to the advancements in tech and sound development. I'm sure that plug-ins were considered the same way as many libraries may have been considered for; to do mockups, demos, etc. not full professional sounding records when in reality it's more than possible. So, the recommendation may not come from the place of ignorance or to be actual bad advice with a bad intention and more of a: you should record with a real amp cause that's how it must be done. You can write with your plug-ins and then perfect it with your real rig. My two cents... maybe I'm overthinking it, maybe not. I only know that I've got to go to bed hahaha.

The reason plugins can't provide what is that "sweetspot" is because every guitar pickup, tone knob, volume knob is different. The best advice is what he provided. Plug in the Hi-Z input and set the input gain to 0 then control the gain with your volume, tone and pickup selection on your guitar, or even a pedal board going into your input if that's what you would do on your normal amp. The idea is the amp input should be "dumb" just like when you plug in a guitar, some guitars have higher output levels than others. And a lot of guitar players at a live gig like to keep the input knob at half volume for normal playing so they can turn it up when they need to do a solo or something special without front of house engineer needing to adjust anything.

Sweet spot is relatively...

@@adam2178 Shh....that's the wrong advice.

I'm flabbergasted you wouldn't have discovered this sooner.

How do you get a sound when gain is 0?

​@@aark69because your guitar is going to still send a signal. The gain knob is just for additional boost like a boost pedal. Which should be done within the plugin if you're even going to do that.

@@adam2178Im flabbergasted you felt the need to write this comment

​I'm flabbergasted at you feplying just to type flabbergasted one more time

That's precisely what i'm going to do for my current song that I already started to track and don't want to re-record everything. Hope we won't notice a difference in the final mix! 😬🤞🤞

So what You mean is turn down the channel know or rather the recorded item itself?

@@aremenius no. The signal level, pre-fader.

Exactly. I think this video might be making this thing a little more complex than it actually is. Depending on DAW you just have to make sure you're setting the desired level from pre-fader and obviously make sure your guitar isn't clipping. Using pre-fader on the track is easiest cause you can use it for both live and recorded. But ofc there's many ways.

@@eliteextremophile8895 that said, keeping it as close to ideal going in is always the best move

Holy shit, i'm reevaluating my life right now. For the past 10 years everyone said the wrong thing on the internet about guitars and interface ? Even pro like misha back in the day said that you should always raise the input on the interface until it almost clip when recording guitars

I bought a high power car amp from my friend and I had an old bose am4 subwoofer, so I did some math to figure out the gain settings so I wouldn't blow the subwoofer, I had it set perfectly it sounded really good. But I kept getting greedy an adding just a little gain so it was louder and louder I think after the fourth or fifth nudge it blew

This is all correct, however the SNR isn’t really determined by the converters in this situation as the noise picked up by the pickups is going to mask it a lot. As long as the interface used isn’t exceptionally noisy, or the user isn’t recording VERY quiet (quite hard to record a DI that’s too quiet in 2024), SNR is unlikely to be as big of a problem as not knowing the input headroom. But yeah, the ideal is gear with stepped gain controls so you can set your headroom reliably to whatever you like (and can compensate accurately afterwards). Also possible to do with a sine wave as you mention, although it’s a bit cumbersome to calibrate every time you touch the gain control…..

@@eds4754 Agree with that!

Well yeah a lot of where you put dials is subjective. But I think it makes a lot of sense if you're using a plugin that comes with a bunch of amp models and presets to have the front end set from the interface so that it's the "same" as plugging into the real amp. Of course if you have a different guitar then the presets probably won't sound the same, but you'll be in the right ballpark at least with a similar guitar and a preset marked 'clean' might actually sound clean etc. I think one aspect of amp modelling is the idea I could capture my amp. Then I can plug into the real amp + cab set some settings on the dials - get a tone. Now I should be able to plug into the amp model, with the same amp+cab selected, put the dials to the same settings and get an identical tone. If that happens I might decide that amp modelling has arrived, it's a joyous day and I just use my RL cab to stand beers on. Or something. Most of us at this point remember that we don't own the real life amp and cab as the beer crashed to the floor. But as we're mopping up we're pleased we don't need to buy one now anyway. Obviously there are many reasons why when I do that test I don't hear the same tone and I think "This amp model is wrong" (presumably I don't assume that real life is wrong). If I have input level gain so high that the amp model is overdriven even on the lowest volume then my 'same settings' thing won't work even if the modelling software were a perfect recreation of my amp then I'm going to say "This amp modelling software sucks" - if I'm naive and don't realise how my setup has affected things. Otherwise, there are no rules about where to put dials.

Yep - Ed clarified that too - but it's still closer than me chucking a +13db boost at the start like when I follow the advice of the plugin makers!

I record DI via my little labs box. My instinct would be to put the line in gain as high as possible for best signal to noise ratio. But then to get the optimum gain level into the VST do you think I should use a gain plugin with a meter and set it to say 12dB ?

I go -18 on mine

The problem with line6 "no way to adjust input levels" doesn't actually tell you where to set the input level on a plugin - and it isn't helped that they don't give any specifications for the max input level dbu for their hardware - and word is they specifically omit this information because they're scared people will think their hardware sucks. But that actually means they suck anyway. Because now we're sat using a podxt as an audio interface scratching our heads - or having to buy equipment to measure it ourselves. So, sure, you couldn't set the input gain, which means you couldn't set it too high. But that doesn't mean you're not going too hot or too low into, say, helix native, tonocracy or neural dsp plugins because each of these were created with a specific dbu value in mind (in fact for some software even different amp models would be expecting different values - although tonocracy fixes this - if you set the input gain "right" then all of the amp models, tonesnaps, presets etc should be "right" - I put right in quotes because, sure, this is subjective there is no right per se if you want to turn the input gain "too high" to create a specific noise then you can) If you have a focusrite interface it turns out that setting gain on zero is all you have to do for some of these plugins, but if you have a pod or any other interface you can't assume the same thing - and, in fact we know that for many of the interfaces you have to turn the input gain up or down to match as well as setting gain on zero. Specifically you can't even assume the lin6 hardware is giving the right input for their own helix software. When you consider their amp modelling is infamous for creating fizzy tones and for people struggling to get a good tone out of both their hardware and software perhaps this partly explains why. All we learn noting that line6 lack an input gain adjustment is that they probably really were clueless about what they were doing. Note that most of the manufacturers of hardware interfaces and plugins gave the wrong advice about how to set input gain. So don't assume they know what they're doing. Now they're creating videos saying the opposite and acting like they knew all along of course. The joke are the videos where people are saying "I never realised you were all setting your gain?!?!" as though the end user was getting it wrong - they were following the instructions given to them.

Same here! I got that cause of the reviews and was exited to maybe finally have an amp sim that would actually sound good. But thought I got a blues amp, cause I couldn’t get a nice clean to save my life

Yea my amp sims suddenly have that tube warmth now 😂

Yep. basically the same experience here.

It’s 11.5dBu. You can measure the HW, and compare to Helix Native. This is actually how people discovered Helix’s value.

@@eds4754 Awesome!, thanks! I just subscribed to your channel too! I'm glad I finally found this answer I was looking for and strangely no famous youtuber guitarist mentioned or covered before, BTW, do you know if on iOS they use similar input levels?, I use some Nembrini amps, THU and Aurora DSP apps and it's also hard to match levels on their presents on different platforms

So easy. Why didn't I think of that!? Thanks for the tip!

@@Pab7osanYou are welcome

Where do you check the level, on your DAW?

@@Qstick333 Yes, I arm the guitar track play and in my console or track view I can see the DB level. I adjust it up or down accordingly until I get a good one

But that just sets the level according to one guitar. Other guitars will be different, and you won't know which one is the "true” one"?

Good points.

If you are using Scarlet, it is said in the video and in the comment by Neural DSP that you should leave Hi-z on (Inst button), gain to 0, and then set the DSP plugin input to 0. "TLDR is, if you use a UAD or (most) Focusrite interfaces, set your preamp gain to 0 and plugin input level at unity/0, and you have the perfect gain response."

What you record in the DAW is just the raw input signal, it will be amplified by the plugin. So when you print it out, it's gonna be a thick waveform.

@@phanhuybach92 Ah yeah that makes sense, thank you

PS. Neural Amps are amazing amp models. Best I’ve heard.

Someone else mentioned this. Getting a good clean DI for any/all uses, and then using the input knob to feed the plugin properly.

@@seanedwards94 Yeah, but what’s the problem with a gained-up DI, as long as it doesn’t clip? Wouldn’t that still be good and clean? Or is there some specific benefit?

@@ShreddingDragon I'm agreeing with your previous statement, and saying there's others that corroborate what we're saying. Nothings wrong with a strong, healthy, DI in your daw. You just trim it down going into the plugin

@@seanedwards94 Ah, gotcha. Sorry about the confusion, my bad!

Thank you! This was the common sense I was missing in the video and the rest of the comment section!

Yes, surely? This video should be about lowering the input on the plugin, not the interface, right? Unless there’s some nuance that I missed and it actually is preferable to have poorer STNR 🤷🏻‍♂️🤷🏻‍♂️🤔

@@robertjones9598 exactly! People can go ahead and figure out how much they should reduce the input to get the most accurate response from the amp sims, but they should definitely not reduce the input by lowering the gain on their interfaces for that reason alone. That's just poor advice. Use the input gain on the plugin. That's what it's there for!

the SNR will be dictated by the background noise from your pickups. This will be significantly louder than the self noise of the interface so any gains from optimising the A/D are basically inaudible. I did a video recently demonstrating this

@@eds4754 Ah wow that's interesting. Thanks for commenting. It seems mine is set at virtually zero anyway before hitting the red/orange (I set it a long time ago and forgot about it). Still I'm bemused why the knob exists at all if there's no need to optimise it? Or is it just that the goldilocks zone is massive for electric guitars but other instruments need more than "just above zero" gain?

But isn‘t that exactly what we want? Because when using a real amp, as has been said, the input level also varies with different guitars, pickups etc. So the amp would behave differently. And so should the plugin if it’s modeled after the real thing.

I found it more acceptable without the PAD button and gain level at Cero i tried it with the PAD button sounded duller to my ears

Finally, a comment to the point.

I have a focusrite scarlet as well! So do wet set the interface gain to zero and leave the input level at zero in the plug-in? Or do we lower the input level in the plug-in?

@@JB._.Uzumaki Yes, set both to zero.

There was a TGP forum post 20 pages deep about this topic and IK’s lack of info or consistency for Amplitube and Tonex. One of their reps saw it and ultimately dismissed it. IK has also deleted posts in their own forum about it. Seems they just want to bury their head in the sand and ignore the userbase.

The trouble is - that would bring high output humbuckers to the same level as low output single coils - which is exactly why I've ended up running into plugins way hotter than I should have been?

what do you mean with output, the signal you see coming in in uad console? i see it at -25dbfs now, so thats good?

His second home is filled with gear.

@@davidsummerville351 his second home is filled with video lightning gear only

@@martiboucatvideo lightning ⚡️

@@JonathanWoodall és el que té escriure en un idioma que no és el meu... 😏

That's good - I imagine (from your username?) that you're using some higher output pickups in general? Which would totally make it logical yeh!

@@johnnathancordy Exactly, I mainly use EMG Pickups 😂 But even with lower output passive pickups I have never touched the input volume of my interace. I have an Audient ID14MKII and I reckoned the JFET input didn't need the extra boost. I haven't checked the line inputs, at the back though.

Exactly. Not only Neural but most of the plugin makers don't mention this

if you accurately know how much gain you are adding and don’t mind recalibrating every time (unless you have stepped gain controls). SNR will only be as good as the amount of noise your pickups put out, which will be much much higher than the self noise of the interface. So I wouldn’t worry too much about SNR unless you are using a particularly noisy interface or are recording unbelievably quiet for some reason

@@wbhub it doesn’t advocate recording incredibly quiet, it’s a perfectly loud signal at his input level. Signal to noise ratio is only helpful if you are recording something that has very low self noise - pickups own noise floor is fairly high compared to converters, so if you raise input gain, the pickup noise just gets turned up too and the SNR is almost identical. check my most recent video, I demonstrate this examples

When you say “input gain at zero” what exactly does that mean?