Re: GAIN STRUCTURE

[Warren Sirota <wsirota@wsdesigns.com>]

At the risk of adding more confusion that clarification, I'll say what
i'd do, which is to wring out the noise and distortion systematically
from the first stage to the last.

you are navigating between the Scylla and Charybdis of noise and
distortion. if any input level to any device is too high, it will
overdrive the input and cause distortion. if it's too low, then the
receiving device will have to over-amplify the signal, and will
amplify the noise floor as well, causing, well, noise to be more
evident.

the output level of your guitar might be treated a little differently,
as in some setups it is deliberately used to overdrive the next stage,
so you might want an optimal clean setup with your guitar output set
to 7 or 8. i don't usually do things this way, but Eddie Van Halen
probably would.

So, first, I'd hook up guitar to Vortex, put the guitar vol where you
like it, and try to check that I had an optimal signal coming out the
Vortex (primarily by adjusting the input gain control on the vortex).
of course, to listen to the vortex means that you have to put it's
output into a mixer or something, so you need to make sure that you're
not over-or-under-driving the input of the mixer by fiddling with the
Vortex output. but your vortex output settings may change when you
insert the next item in the chain.

after you've got this stage optimized, write down the vortex input
gain setting - this will not change.

then insert one more device between vortex and mixer. turn input gain
on new device down, turn vortex output up to max, or to somewhere in
the 7-8 range (a lot of device seem to operate best around there for
some reason) and see whether you've overdriven the new input. adjust
the input gain on the new device up until you hear distortion at the
output.

keep moving forward.

i'm sure people will find ways to pick this apart, but this kind of
methodology has stood me in good stead.

Warren