Having a Hard time normalizing my output between amps, when I’m switching between a clean to drive, the drive is just Soul crushingly loud. I added a compressor on the backend, but I wanted to see if anyone else had any suggestions.
I set up four scenes across the bottom switches… usually clean, crunch, drive, and lead, or some variation depending on the song. Within each scene, you can balance the output volume in various ways without impacting the tone. You can assign the amp’s output knob to the scene, insert a gain block near the end of the chain and control it via scenes, or even adjust the master out. Compression can also help level things if you like the way it sounds in that scene.
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I typically set up my presets in Hybrid mode, with Scenes on the bottom row of switches. I treat Scenes E-H as amp channel switching, going from clean, to crunch, to lead. Just like the footswitch of any 3- or 4-channel amp.
When I’m building a new preset like this, I go through each scene and compare the average gain levels going to the output (press the output on the grid to pull it up). From there I can see what is going on when using different amp blocks. Then I can go into the individual amp blocks and dial them up or down accordingly so everything is in the same ballpark on the output…
…But that’s not the whole picture. Even if different amp blocks are dialed so the output block shows the same level, there may still be a difference in our perception of volume. At my house, at low volume, it’s fairly easy to get even volume levels betweeen scenes. But when I take my QC out to a gig, suddenly the high gain amp scenes are way too loud.
It’s the Fletcher-Munson curve. High gain amp models pump out a ton of high frequency content, and our ears become a lot more sensitive to that at high volumes.
I don’t know what your playing and listening environment is, but try to get your scenes around a similar level on the output. Then try adding an EQ block after whatever high gain amp block you’re using. Set the EQ to filter out some of the high end; 8 KHz is a good starting cutoff point, but depending on your environment (the room, your guitar + pickups, playing style, etc.) maybe go down to about 6 KHz. Check output levels again and adjust.
You may find that there’s a lot less of a jump in perceived volume when switching to high gain. Compression can help too, but try to focus on EQ / filtering first.
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