I like mine in the green with not much yellow showing if ever.
 
How do you all set your meters through your busses in Cakewalk?
 
What color?
 
 

I try to keep them about two thirds of the way up before they hit red.  Keeps plenty of headroom for the mixing stage.

Pay more attention to RMS levels myself, -21to -18

Thanks for the replies, they are very helpful!  I should have been more specific, I am talking about how you set gain going into the prochannel do you let the green dots hit yellow? 

RexRed
Thanks for the replies, they are very helpful!  I should have been more specific, I am talking about how you set gain going into the prochannel do you let the green dots hit yellow? 

 
If you are referring to how much of a signal is feed to the Pro channel modules, you want it to be green, at times yellow, never red.

Yeah, what Chuck said.  Yellow greenish

... I think he said Green yellowish.
 

 

In truth, I almost never look at the track meters except to make sure nothing's hitting red. Most tracks peak around -12 dB but I'm not obsessive about it. Exactly where your track peaks fall is unimportant, as long as what they sum to stays reasonable. It's not like the tape days, when track levels profoundly affected sound quality - with digital, you have an enormous acceptable range.
 
What counts is what all those tracks add up to. On the master bus I like to ideally be under -6 dBFS pre-limiter, but it depends on how percussive the material is. For highly-percussive stuff, I don't sweat -1 dB peaks on kicks or tympani. The important thing is the peak-to-average ratio (crest factor); I want to see those drum hits rise above the fray.
 
Post-limiter depends on the target medium: -0.5 for CD and FLAC, -1 dB for MP3. But nowadays I pay more attention to the LUFS meter (iZotope Insight), setting a target of -13 or -14 LUFS for most things. 
 
Admittedly, I probably do not represent the average user, though. I prefer the final limiter to be doing as little as possible - ideally nothing at all.

It's always a good idea to gain stage sensibly from the get go - even though you can comfortably peg tracks in the red without any clipping, you still have to watch your levels going into plugins, especially some of the modern analog modeled ones that have an optimum input level where the plugin performs at its best (usually calibrated at 0dBVU = -18dBFS).
 
And I find that if you gain stage with a view to keeping plugins happy, your overall mix level generally ends up pretty sensible as well. 

sharke
It's always a good idea to gain stage sensibly from the get go - even though you can comfortably peg tracks in the red without any clipping, you still have to watch your levels going into plugins, especially some of the modern analog modeled ones that have an optimum input level where the plugin performs at its best (usually calibrated at 0dBVU = -18dBFS).
 
And I find that if you gain stage with a view to keeping plugins happy, your overall mix level generally ends up pretty sensible as well. 

that's my way of thinking