Gain staging your plugin

[Morphoice]

Here's more of a general question for those making software synthesizers.
How do you gain-stage your plugin?
By default everything has -12dB... If you have multiple oscillators, what do you set them up to? What ranges do you give the user control over to get a decent sum signal in the end that's not too quiet but doesn't blow everything on huge chords?

[griffinboy]

@Morphoice

I just match it against the plugins that I like the volume output of.
Compare in the daw and also monitor the dsp in scriptnode if you want to target something specific. Most daws are 32 bit so you don't have to worry about going over 0 you are allowed to clip from what I understand.

I'm a fan of gain staging so that a VU meter will hit the ideal readings for feeding into analog sims (peaking at 0db on the meter when using the plugin normally, calibrated to -18db).

Hise itself will clip if it gets loud. but if I'm correct I think it wont clip in the daw.

[Morphoice]

@griffinboy what even is the headroom inside of HISE anyways? I noticed much above 0dB and you're screwed. I'm used to my SSL console which has 32dB headroom

[aaronventure]

@Morphoice you can find my closed github issue where HISE fires like a +100 db signal. I'm grateful to always be running a limiter in the chain or at least running the HISE output through Reaper where I always have a limiter on the Monitor FX.

[Morphoice]

@aaronventure awesome. that should be fixed ;))) it almost cost me my monitor speakers in the studio lol. thankfully the SSL G Bus Compressor was on

[clevername27]

This post is deleted!