All right, so now I'm going to talk about how to set your levels properly
in Traktor.
Now it's really important to get your levels correct when you're mixing.
Just like with the recordings, if you push your levels too high
and you start going into the reds, you're going to get distortion,
the dynamics of the track are going to change.
When you start hitting the reds in a song,
it's cutting off the low frequencies and the high frequencies.
Sometimes you even get digital distortion,
which is the worst kind of distortion where it sounds just really crunchy.
And your dancers are going to hate you, because it's
going to sound terrible on the floor.
The idea here is to get your levels loud enough so you get the best dynamics out
of the song, without going too loud.
But you also don't want to be too quiet, because when you record too quiet,
that means you have to boost the recording later.
That could introduce some kind of noise in your recording as well.
If I was to play a song, you can see the levels coming through the mixer.
And you see these LEDs here.
We have blues and we have oranges or reds, however you see it.
So the idea here is to get the gain high enough
so that the levels are hitting the maximum blues,
but hardly ever hitting orange.
OK?
So when I'm setting the levels of my tracks, I'm using the gain
and I'm thinking about, it's always best to set them
at the loudest part of the song.
So I'm going to skip to the meat of the record.
And then I'm just going to use my gains and look at the levels.
So I'm going to turn the gain down so it's just
high enough so it's not hitting orange.
If it hits orange every once in a while, that's OK, but just be careful.
So I have a few volume controls.
You remember I have my gain, and that controls
the amount of signal coming through.
Use that to get the LEDs in the blues.
Then I have my volume fader, which controls
the amount of that signal that's coming through the mixer.
And then I have my master volume, which is up here.
Now as far as the master volume, you want
to also turn that up so it's as loud as possible without hitting the reds.
Now in Traktor, you can also see in the mixer section of Traktor,
we have the same features.
We have the gain in each deck.
We have the volume fader.
And then we have the main levels up at the top.
Now keep in mind that the main level in the Traktor software,
it's separate from the main level of the Traktor hardware.
So it will still affect the main levels, but are two different things.
Here's how I would recommend setting your levels.
I always just like to keep the gains at 12 o'clock if I can.
If it's too hot.
I just turn them down a little bit here.
The main level I like to leave negative 3 dB.
That way it gives you a little bit of what's called head room or basically
room before you hit distortion.
Now there's a couple of settings in the preferences
that are also really important.
So if I go to preferences mixer, in the levels section,
I have these two options.
We have enable auto gain.
So I explained that auto gain makes every song the same volume.
And you can even see the auto gain level.
If I turn this blue dot here on the gain knob off,
you can see that it's put this song to a negative 0.3 dB.
Let me just try loading a couple of songs.
See, this song, it actually raised the volume plus 3.0 dB.
This song's at 0.1 dB, so you can see that every song has a different level.
And with auto gain on, it's automatically
putting each song at equal volume.
So then we have what's called enable limiter.
So what a limiter is, is it's a compressor.
And it's almost like a safe mode.
So if you start hitting the reds in the software,
instead of it giving you a distorted signal,
like a terrible sounding signal, what's it's
going to do is it's going to kind of squash the sound a little bit.
So limiter is like a very harsh compressor.
So it'll make sure there's no distortion, but just keep in mind,
once you hit the reds, you're hitting the limiter,
and the limiter will reduce the dynamics of the song,
cutting the low frequencies and the high frequencies of the song off.
So do I want to use the limiter or do I not want to use the limiter?
That's a good question.
And I would say if you're mixing internally
using the S4 or any other sort of internal mixer or controller,
it's good to have the limiter on.
If you really know what you're doing with your levels,
you can turn the limiter off to get the best kind of sound quality.
Just don't hit the reds.
Did I just say, don't hit the reds?
Never hit the reds.
Stay out of the reds.
So then we have this headroom setting.
And headroom will basically give us an extra, for example,
3.0 dB of gain reduction.
I always like to leave the headroom at negative 3 dB.
So now I basically have between the main volume and the headroom,
I have actually a total of negative 6.0 dB of headroom.
So that way, I just know that I'm never hitting the reds.
So that's how to set your levels.
Just never go on the reds.
Please and thank you.