User guide

Tracktion 4 Reference Manual
184
So why the need to lower the master volume? If you look at your master level you should see why.
Despite the fact that you have dropped the master volume by 6 dB, the level meter will be showing the
same level as the level meters on tracks one and two. Because both tracks are receiving exactly what
was fed to the rack, with no attenuation anywhere, the level has effectively been doubled.
The thing to note here is that racks allow you to move audio from one track to another, and they do
this by being in two places at once.
You may want to save this edit, as we will come back to it in a few pages time.
Building Blocks: A Modular World
Rack lters aren’t just useful for moving audio around, they have another, wholly different, trick up
their sleeve too.
What you have seen so far is the outside of a rack lter, and much like any of the other lters you
have used inside Tracktion, what goes on inside them is largely unknown. One engaging aspect of real
hardware is that you can, if you are so inclined, take the lid off and poke around at the stuff that makes
it all work. That’s not so easy to do with software, and most likely would be in violation of the software
license anyway. Rack lters can’t give you access to the low-level workings of lters, but if you do like
to experiment a little, they offer a good compromise.
In short, rack lters allow you to take a group of lters and use them as building blocks to make more
powerful lters. You could, for instance, layer a number of software instruments, to create powerful
monster synthesisers. Maybe you’ve got some ideas for creating interesting stereo widening effects
by processing the stereo channels in different ways. Or perhaps you just want to save a few of your
favourite effects chains for use across projects. Either way, it’s worth taking the lid of off rack lters and
looking inside. We will look at how to do this over much of the remainder of this chapter.
Figure 9.1.2