Increasing the gain of submix FX

Development Audio
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1

I am using submix sends from soundclasses/metasounds to add FX such as reverb to sounds. I’m finding it quite difficult to simply just increase the volume of the FX submix since the submix itself + the effect don’t have a gain function that goes above 0dB.

I want to increase the volume of the reverb relative to the sound, and currently the only way I know how to is by reducing the volume of the submix that the sounds are being sent to, but keeping the FX submix at a higher level. This seems like quite an inefficient / confusing way to work.

  • The FX has only dry and wet, the dry doesn’t go above 0dB
  • The Submix has Output, Dry, Wet, none of them go above 0dB
  • If I use a Soundclass to reduce the volume of the sounds, the volume of the reverb also reduces since the reduction is happening before the send

I thought there may even be a gain effect that I could add to the chain in the FX submix, but there isn’t.

What is the best practice here to simply increase the volume of a convolution reverb effect above the default level?

Was hoping to avoid using submixes for mixing, we want to do that with Soundclasses and CBMs (which has also been the advice given by UE devs)

2

Hey Yoni, have you tried just increasing the volume of the IR asset itself - it defaults to -24dB?

3

Hey Steve, apologies for the late reply, missed this one.

I didn’t know that was possible but that’s useful, thank you.

Is there any other way to increase the volume above 0dB?

4

0db is the max you can push it to, you’ll want to look at increasing either the amount you are sending to the submix, or the original asset volume itself

Are you using a submix send, and if so is it based on distance, linear or a set volume?

Technically you can add a comp/limiter to a submix and the use makeup to make the output louder, but not sure thats the ideal solution!

5

Many IRs are simply wave files. If you have the in wave file format you could normalize them to unity gain in your DAW of choice. If you have them as USoundWave assets you can use the built in waveform editor to normalize the volume before converting them to an IR.

Adding a gain to the convolution reverb is definitely something we could consider adding.

6

No worries, that’s good to know. Thanks guys