When bouncing my midi drums (mainly SSD 5.5), to audio tracks and hardly getting the original levels.

Hello all. Very new to the forum and I apologize if this question has been raised a trillion times. But I’m completely stuck. If any one could lend a few pointers, it would be much appreciated.

When I’m staring a new track I’m using mainly SSD 5.5 and Native Instruments session instruments on my Apollo twin x and Mac Studio. No plugins or processiog at this point, just a raw arrangement with everything at unity,…faders and pan knobs. I shoot for around -12 dbfs on my levels on the midi tracks and when I bounce everything down, maybe do a little gain staging and clip gain just to make sure levels are “decent,” I export everything to a folder to import into a new “mix session.” However, almost everytime, I can hardly ever begin a mix because the levels are completely out of whack from the original session.

I can’t figure it out. It’s either super quiet to where I can barely see an audio wave on a track or so muddy and all over the place loud it’s not even worth trying to manage it, so I just end up starting all over again and keep getting the same results. I’m hellbent on grasping proper techniques for gainstaging and getting this figured out. Should I just keep working in my original session and not export the new audio files? Just do a “save as,” erase the midi and go from there?

this is driving me crazy.

Any thoughts?

thanks so much,

Jordan