@musictranscriber If you need to get the level of a channel or effect, use .getCurrentLevel(). (Effect of Synth based). That said, gain staging is sort of project dependent so there's not really a gold standard that I'm aware of for everything, and if I'm not mistaken in the digital world, anything (before an effect anyway), even if clipped, still has its information intact and can be recovered, which can be verified by clipping your initial synth by 6db or so, then reducing the second by an equal amount and comparing the results.
M