Cakewalk Recording Question

[ryan05]

I'm new to recording. I have Cakewalk 9.0, a Roland UA-100, and Roland monitors. Here's my question: When I record more than one track & play them back, the overall volume gets louder and it sounds like they were recorded in a tunnel. If I record a rhythm track and then a 4 measure lead part for example, the volume is louder for both tracks. Once the lead part drops out, the volume drops and it no longer sounds like they're in a tunnel. Any ideas?

[Jim Y]

I don't have Cake9 but it sounds like the softwares internal "virtual mixer" is overloading. When you play more than one track, the mixer is actually adding them together. For 2 tracks this can produce signal peaks twice the amplitude of a single track.
Somewhere, you might have an option to mixdown at 24 or 32bit accuracy which is then downsampled to 16 bit. But I would expect this to be the default for the software. Try reducing the level of all your tracks by at least 6db.

As you are using a USB interface, beware of having any other USB devices in use. There is barely enough bandwidth in USB for digital audio.

What sample rate and bit depth are you using for your audio? What version of Direct X is installed? I have heard of a bug in DirectX that truncates 24bit audio to 16bit.

[ryan05]

I don't think the mixer is overloaded. What would cause the "tunnel sound?" The sample rate is 44100 and bit depth is 16.

[AlChuck]

A tunnel, eh? Sounds like comb filtering to me, though I would expect it to be dropping in overall volume too, not rising. Though if you are recording your parts as stereo tracks that could complicate things.

Did you solo the tracks to hear if they are truly distinct? I suspect the lead track for its four measures contains the lead track and rhythm guitar too. If you are somehow routing the original track into the new one via erroneous routing on an external mixer or recording off the "What U Hear" signal from the sound card, or picking it up the playback onto the new track with a mic, this can easily happen.

Here's what happens -- if you record part B and the track picks up the first part as well, when you play the two tracks together, there is a very slight delay between the first track and its copy. This causes some frequencies to interfere with each other and the blended sound that reaches your ears sounds funny, often like it's all hollowed out or has some very odd filtering going on.

Maybe if you describe your process we can confirm that possibility or rule it out...