Gain staging/Input levelling on the Quad Cortex: Does it even matter and what should you do?

[@DomTremendous]

Good video. It's bizarre to think that there may be an issue with my QC. So, I have my input gain at +6 or +7 for my charvel so cal with high output humbuckers.

[@DwayneCreates]

That's quite interesting, because that's quite a high amount of input gain. Do you know what the pickups are in yours? I assume they're similar to the high output pickups on mine. Whats your input level reading at 0db?

[@TheBukman]

Thanks for the video Fundamentally any modeller should be able to recreate the same scenario as someone plugging into an actual amp. When we plug into an amp the sound will change based on the guitar and the pickups. Active high gain pickups will push the amp more than a vintage single coil guitar would. If the tone isn't right you just adjust the amp controls. Any physical modeller device that forces a user to adjust the input gain is flawed in its design in my opinion. I suspect the QC is designed properly just like the Fractal devices are so if you use the stock amp models they should work as intended with input gain at zero. Where it gets blurry is the 3rd party neural capture because if the capture was made with anything but input gain at zero then our stock strat won't sound like a strat with that capture until we match the input gain to the same setting of the actual original capture. All we can hope is the captures were made at zero input gain. I have an Axe FX and the QC plus a lot of tube heads and to save headaches I treat all the same and leave input gain at unity and tweak the sound in the actual preset or on the amp itself based on whatever guitar I have plugged in. Way less headaches. If the QC 3rd party capture or QC amp model doesn't sound right I leave the input as is and tweak the preset until it does sound right and then I save the preset. Job done. I agree however that the plug in world is a complete different beast and my approach goes out the door because they all make their plug in reference levels different. Thankfully I don't really use plug ins.

[@DrakeBergman]

It would be great if there were a way to change the I/O settings per preset if we wanted to, but I don’t know how that could be implemented without being really finicky

[@DwayneCreates]

I'm a software developer and have thought about this. Considering the input level is controlled via the interface, it's already controlled by software, seems to me they could add an input block to the QC which just controls the overall input level we already set. And if a preset has an input block, on load, it just sets the input level to whatever the preset specifies. I'd love to see this.

[@DrakeBergman]

@@DwayneCreates Technically, they could almost do it right on the pre-existing input selection block where the default gate is contained too, don't you think? That would be wicked. It seems like it should inherently be there but was an afterthought.

[@kentrian2165]

Singlecoil = 0db Humbacker = -6db Active pickups = ?