Gain staging on the OT can be a major pain.
IN general what seems to work for me is: set the volume of the samples to a consistent one in the sample edit page. This way I have a solid base and don’t have to tweak things separately in every part.
Each track on each part then has two volume settings. One is like a VCA and comes before the FX and is called VOL (it’s on the AMP page) the other is the LEV.
The above difference is not trivial. If you have to fade out a track but do not want the delay tail to fade out with it in an unnatural way (as when you turn down the volume post-FX) then you need to use VOL.
LEV is not really intended to be p-locked or animated much, in general it’s advisable to use VOL except for main level adjustments (and XVOL if you want to modulate that via scenes).
Both LEV and VOL are stored in the part. This means that if you have track 1 wit ha level of 108 (default) in one part and with a level of 60 in the other, when you switch over you’ll get a jump in volume. Also all the parameters for a track (and hence also VOL and LEV) are always at the last setting you have put them to and there’s really not much you can do about it.
I do use the fader a lot to do volume fades. If you plan a piece carefully you can do all sorts of things with the fader by modulating VOL or using XVOL.
Another thing I do a lot is to prepare everything in an arrangement, organizing the piece in chains of patterns that loop and pre-setting on which scene I want the OT to land when it changes the pattern.
So for example, let’s say you have a track that you want to fade down at the end, and you then want to fade that same track up when the next pattern starts, but the two patterns are using different parts.
What you do is that you set up a scene where you can fade the track down, and another scene (in the next pattern) where you have the XVOL set to zero. In the arrangement you then select that scene to be assigned automatically when the pattern starts.
So when you reach the pattern where you want to do the fade out, you use the xfader to fade it down, then change to the next pattern without moving the fader. The scene where the track you need to fade up will be automatically selected, so now all you have to do is move the fade back to the other side to do the fade up.
