best recording/sound level procedure for Q10

[melloman]

I am using a Q10 and Sonar 3. Sometimes I have had recording runs where the levels in Sonar look good before the actual recording, but the recording is either much lower or higher than it appears in both Aardvark mixer and Sonar. Sometimes it can take several aborted takes to get the level right. The overdriven/underdriven issue is kinda tough when we only have a couple of hours at any one time to do things.
I know there are many things that can be done for presets (like finding a happy medium and locking it in) and I'd be interested in finding what Q10 users here are doing. Sometimes it seems a little TOO flexible.

[Matias]

I work this way.

I set the mics level on the Q10 mixer so I get the hottest signal without clipping, and also taking care about noise floor.

Use compressors on your host to control and unify the signal dynamics.

>Sometimes it can take several aborted >takes to get the level right.

This is beyond your reach, this kind of things happens very often, varying from singer to singer, mic, position etc...

My personal advice is, get the hottest dry signal you can get without clipping on the Q10 mixer,and control the rest with compression.

[oops]

Before exporting audio to a wav, you must take into considration that each submix adds to the overall volume,and each seperate main out adds to the overall volume as well. It takes a few attempts at reaching a good level. I subtract from each main out a consistant amount of overall volume either with compression, or insert a submix, call it the master, send all channels to submix1, send submix one to master, send master to primary out. Lower the master accordingly. Hope this helps.