How to: john mayer plugin - how to set up input gain

Plugins
1

IF YOU ARE LIKE ME (NOOB) and couldn’t figure out why the John Mayer plug-in was so volume senstive .. please read the below how to properly set this up. I am using a focusrite, but same concept for any system

(I wish neuraldsp had a “how to” video for us NOOBS, if they can use this for all the other NOOBS that bought this just for the JM plug in)

Steps:

  1. Turn your guitar all the way to 10
  2. Load the “focusrite control” or whatever UI interface you have. You need to be able to read how many decibles you are putting in.
  3. Turn your USB Interface *(UI)* down to ZERO on input. Ensure “Inst” is turn ON.
  4. STRUM REALLY HARD
  5. Your UI software will tell you how many decibles it is. In my case it was -23db.
  6. Turn up the input volume on your UI, STRUM REALLY HARD, until you hit just below clipping. Usually -6 or -9
  7. Take the difference of the two, (in my case -14, -23 vs -9)
  8. On the JM plugin, turn your input down by the difference (-14) and lock it.

Congrats, you can finally play it as it was meant to be played!

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That’s exactly how I set up my plugins/QC or anything that needs to go through an analog-to-digital conversion. It just… works.

I do also agree that those vendors should make this pre-setup clearer for their products. Such a basic and important thing, right?

As a noob myself, I discovered this by accident and had to really dig into why some of my guitars were so quiet and noisy sometimes. I like playing with dynamics and use the guitar volume knob to clean up distorted amps. Amps started sounding thin and “too digital”; noise suppressors were cutting my sound too early. I was intrigued by how the volume pedal worked so well after the input stage.

Once I realized that these steps were actually making the damn thing work as intended, I still wanted to check the why. So I found this video by folks from Ghost Note Audio, which explains gain staging in detail.

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