MDrumLeveller certain notes deafening?

[elvisish]

When using MDrumLeveller, I find that most of the track sounds okay, but if certain notes are hit slightly too hard they come out really REALLY loud. I've tried adjusting the thresholds, but that just quietens the other notes. Any suggestions what I should adjust to stop this happening?

[elvisish]

Okay, I think it has to do with needing to change the lookahead from 20ms to 42 ms, in this case. Are there any downsides to doing this?

[MeldaProduction]

I understand - the problem is, with certain signals the default 20ms doesn't seem to be enough. For mixing it doesn't matter, feel free to set it to 50ms, no problem. The lower value is better simply because less latency less problems when doing something live.

Technically, MDrumLeveler is capable of detecting the hits with no lookahead at all. The trouble is detecting their loudness - the lower the drum is frequency-wise (hence bass drums are the worst), the longer it needs. If you think about it, just one period of 50Hz wave needs to 20ms, so that's kind of the minimum needed to detect loudness for a drum with dominant 50Hz. And if it doesn't detect the loudness correctly, no problem, it will work, but the corrections won't work correctly. You can still use the Gate feature without problems as that needs just the hit detection, but actual velocity adjustment could produce some nasty hits. From my experience it really just depends on the actual recording (it's not about being recorded well or not, just sometimes...)

[elvisish]

Thanks for the explanation, the lookahead has worked perfectly to reduce the random loud notes, and all of the hits are being leveled perfectly, thanks again!

[MeldaProduction]

Perfect!