Great, let's go ahead and dive into effects and learn how to use these guys. Now if we're recording a song was like cooking a meal then I would think of effects as kind of like my spice rack. You can cook without spices, just like you can record without effects but you get kind of a bland meal, and you can't really produce much of anything except meat and potatoes kinds of dishes. With effects we can take basic tracks and turn them into really cool creations. But taking that cooking and spicing spices analogy. Further, we have a shortlist of spices that we use every day and then we have specialty spices that we bring out and use in moderation every now and again.

Too much and too many different spices is the mark of an inexperienced chef right. Most dishes require salt and pepper. Not really exciting, but definitely the two spices you reach for most often. I would argue that those spices in the effects work would be reverb and delay. Most tracks can benefit from them in moderation. And they kind of add over the top in terms of their sound.

The guy have a vocal up here and here are our effect sensor. I can bring this vocal up actually have it soloed. And we can add some effects if you catch me. Obviously the lesson we can take from this is that there are some sort of special effects that just kind of like spices they used every now and again, but the delays and the reverbs are the ones that we typically use. They will note that on the bonus disk, we have a whole hour Specific effects that are taken from a reason DVD, I did it a while ago that I really go through a lot of effects, including some fuckos, and things like that. But this session about effects, we're going to be basically looking at an overview of the effects that we typically use in recording and mixing.

Now before we have looked at an overview of all these different types of effects, the first thing we really need to nail down is how we route this through a normal mixer or a recorder. And I want to use reason record by propellerhead software. I don't have any particular bias here, it's just that he has an amazing analogous view here of real hardware devices. So this looks like a mixer. This looks like an effects device or a permanent delay. This is a drum machine down here.

But here's where it gets really cool. If I hit the Tab key, it flips around here and we can make all that connections. Just grab these connections and just ship them and just you know, play Going into something else, that's a great way to really understand what's going on kind of underneath the hood, even if you have a, an all in one record box. So let's flip this back around here. Everybody's pretty familiar with a mixer like this, right? We have a number of channels here.

I think it's 14 channels here that all go to a master left and right. Now what have we got connected to these guys, if I flip this back around, you can see that I have a kick, snare and hi hat coming out of this virtual drum machine. And you can see they're directly placed into these channels. If I split that back around and play the drum machine, you can see here we have them. I can bring each one up, and we can hear them individually. So the lesson we're trying to learn is how to route effects.

Here's the easiest way to route effects. We've done this, all that you know if you've ever plugged some stompboxes into, sorry, from your guitar distortion box into an AMP you've done this way. Let's go back here and we'll take the kick drum here and what I'm going to do is just disregard that connection. So normally it would go from here up to here, but let's take it up into a reverb here, sister babe. I'm just gonna take one side right now. So take it out for this guy here into the input and output of that reverb back up to here.

So you can see what's happened where it used to go directly up there. Now we inserted this reverb into the signal chain. If I flick that back around, and we play that you can see the kick drum is going through that reverb. And we can hear that reverb right. I could do the same thing over here and take the snare drum and then connect that over to To the delay, right? In fact, let's just do that.

So disconnect that right now. And I'll bring this in here. And the output of that guy, I'll bring it up here. Okay, so now we have the kick drum going into the reverb, the snare drum, a snare drum going into the delay, and let's have a listen to what that sounds like. So you can hear the snare drum is being delayed over here. So now, imagine we had all of this filled up.

Let's see, let me let me go back the way we inserted these effects with the sources worked out great, right? But let's imagine we're in the hardware world, and we only have those two effects. Well, we can't use them. All right, if we had a whole mixer full of all these channels and all these sources, how could we put them through these, these reverbs I mean, it really can't be done. If you're using them. In the insert routing, so let's flip, flip this back around.

And let's go ahead and just take these back to what so the way they were okay, and this guy went up here. And this guy went up here. And let's just talk about auctions for a minute. If I turn this, mix it back around, we're all very familiar with how all of these channels go to the left and right out, right, these guys are routed to this output, and this goes out into our speakers and so on. But on a lot of mixers, you'll find auxiliary sense. It's kind of implied in the in the wording of the auxiliary send, an auxiliary send us means it's another output of the mixer that goes somewhere.

And traditionally, were these little knobs. Well, let me actually Do this, but tennis back around. Whenever I bring up those knobs, a little bit of that channel will come out here and go somewhere. And typically where that will go is into an effect. Or if you're in the live world, you can also use these oxygens right here to go out to monitor send. So that you can send varying amounts of each of these channels out to monitors on stage monitors, so that musician can hear themselves, let's slice it that for the moment is talking about our accent.

So here's the deal. Let's take the output of this guy. And I'm going to put it in the reverb, right. If I flip this back around, that should mean that as I move this up and down, that's going to send a variable amount of this channel out to this guy, and let's see if that actually does it. Here we go. Let me break it down.

And it's watch these meter this meter down here. Just as you can see this is going out of the box and and things getting the here but the deal we're not hearing any reverb account or we haven't completed the loop. So let me tap back around. We have successfully brought the kick drum up here, send out an ox loop into this reverb, then we need to bring we need to return that reverb back into the mixer. Now you could return it in a few different ways you could return it into another channel if you like. A lot of mixers will have a dedicated auxiliary return.

So let me just take the output right here. And I'll put it into the box return. Now let's have a listen. Great. We have a bunch of reverb and we could do the same thing over here. By taking the second out orcs sin here, and putting that into the delay, and then return that delay back into the second return.

So now all of these channels can send varying amounts to the reverb by using oxygen one, or they can use oxygen to to go out to the delay right there. Just make sure you're returning them there. So what are some things that we can learn from this? Well, first, it's just awesome because you can send varying amounts to have all of these guys, if you had this completely filled up, you could send that out to these guys. And you just really need to start thinking about all of the different gain stages that that that we've got going on. So the output of this goes up into this channel here.

And in fact, let's just solo this channel. So much that mistake anything else right now somebody said the kick drum. So we're sending it to the bride. Well, there's a few few things we need to really think about in terms of level. This guy will adjust the level of the kick drum. And also because this is after this fader, it will adjust the amount of sand going out to the verb.

So if I pull this down, then it won't send anything down here, check it out. So the same completely right along with that. Then if you go along all the way here, you'll notice that there is a master Sen. But all of these ones so imagine if you are sending a whole bunch of orcs in one out to this reverb And the reverb is stored down here at the input. Here's what you could do, you could pull down these guys all individually, or you could do it over here and just back it up a little bit there. So how many gang stations we cut now we got one, two, and three.

And then also over here we have the dry wet. So let's check out how that works. So that means the return of this guy is completely wet, there's no dry signal in there. If you were to pull us all the way back then we wouldn't hear any reverb at all. So typically what I do is I normally have these guys completely on wet, and that way I can kind of get some more bang for the buck out of these guys. And I can make all of my adjustments right down here.

The one thing I will mention is that there are some pre emptive Host sends as well. Now pre and post in, it's not really that useful in terms of an effects and let me show you how it actually works. Let me tag this back around. And instead of this coming out of Oxfam one, let's actually take this out of box and four. Okay, so now the reverb is going to be adjusted right here. Okay, you can hear that.

And like we said before, if we pull this down because the sand is after the spider, then the amount of sin that goes down here tracks with the spider, but check it out. This on this particular mixer, if you press this, then this will be pre fader. In other words, this sin will siphon off the kick drum before it gets this fader. So right now, there's no difference. But if I was to bring this down Check it out exactly what happens. I pull this down, this will bring down the dry kick.

But the send up here is pre fader. So therefore this will happily send down here and then we'll just hear just the reverb which will be totally wet check it out. So all the dry is going away there. Now in terms of effects, why would you want to do this perhaps you just want to have a special effect doesn't like that. We just wanted to just hear just the reverb without the dry thing. You could do it there.

Most commonly This is used for monitor sense. And here's why. If this let's imagine like we said oxen, one if we turn this back around, this can go somewhere. Normally we've or in this example, we've been showing it going on To effect but if this went out to an on stage monitor somewhere, then here's what we could do. Let's imagine that oxygen one goes out to the lead singers on stage monitor, and the onset, the lead singer says, You know what, I don't want to hear any kick drum, I can hear it from behind me, he plays so loud, it hits me in the back back of the chest. What but what I do want to hear is just a little bit of hi hat.

So what you do is just bring that up. And then what that will do is send a little bit of hi hat out to the lead the lead singers for a full monitor. And he'll be happy with that everybody's happy. But let's imagine you're adjusting this guy here, which is your send out to the house, right? And what's happening out in the house is that the hi hat is too loud. If you bring that down.

And this guy is post beta, then you're singer has less hi hat in his monster, right? And he won't be that thrilled he'll as a hair can't hear higher anymore. No wonder he can't hit high anymore because what you've done is you pull this down and his send his post beta. How'd you do that? Well, here's how you do it, you would send his send pre fader on oxygen four. And that way, you can adjust your house as much as you like and you won't be messing with his mix.

As we've seen, there are actually two different ways to route effects we can either insert an effect into one channel only, in other words, place it in line with channel one, channel three or channel eight. Note that it can only be used in one channel only. So particularly for in the hardware world. That's a bitter pill to swallow because you spend all that money on one effect and can only be used on one channel early. Alternately, you can actually set up an effect through an oxen And affects like in other words, you can use the AUC cents for all of these channels and send differing amounts of each of these channels into the effect and then return that effect back into your mixer. So now we've learned how to actually route air effects.

Let's look at an overview of the ones we use most often. Let's start off with the dynamic group of effects. And that would be the compressors, limiters AND gates. Now, we looked at compression briefly in an earlier session. And we said that a compressors job was to squash down the dynamic peaks of a signal. If you have the member you had a big guy in a pitcher, you want to squash him down.

So then you could zoom in and get a better overall level that can kind of cut through the mix. It can also prevent peaks distorting your signal. I've included some compression examples on the companion disk. But let's quickly go through some of the main parameters that are on your average compressive. The big three are threshold ratio and make up game, the threshold sets the bar at which all signal above it is squashed down by certain ratio, so two to one ratio would have the signal above the threshold. Let's imagine our ratio is four to one, then any signal above the threshold will be compressed down to a quarter of its original size if you pump in four DB and when DB comes out, but that threshold, once those peaks have been tamed, then we can make up for that reduction by amping up the entire signal.

That's the makeup game. Kind of using a photo analogy, the compression ratio made the tall person squashed down. And then the makeup game was kind of zooming in so that we could can see everybody there. She got the difference between the original and the compressed version, much, much harder. Let's look at a compression example on an instrument that has a very wide dynamic range. Like I want to drop down baseline into my recorder right here I have my output of my base going into the input, which turns up here on my door, which is propellerheads record, you can see that I have the input selected, I have my level set, and everything's pretty good.

About a good level setting right there if I was just playing finger bass, but what if I was slapping bass? Okay, we can see that we are going in the red there and we're going to be distorting our bass. How do we fix that? Well, compression, dynamic compression to the rescue, I have the output of the bass going into this DB x 166 output of that guy going into the input. So this effect is inserted between the bass and the input. And this has been bypassed the whole time.

If I put that into the chain, actually, it's got a noise gate as well. And have you heard that it just kind of kills the noise between me playing but now with that compressor there I can swipe and I will not get into the red. So you can go from finger impression is your friend. So here are the typical controls on your average compressor. The threshold is where the compressor kicks in any signal below the threshold is not affected. We then have the ratio which is how much compression to one a four to one.

Note, this only affects the material that lives above that threshold, then we have the makeup gain, where we can amp up that resulting signal content, they won't be any big peaks that will distort through there. There are typically two more controls on a compressor and they are attack. And release attack defines how quickly the compressor reacts. Once that threshold has been passed fast attacks clamp down on the signal, immediately slower attacks lets the initial transit go through before the signal is compressed. Well, you might think, why would you want a slower attack on your compressor, sometimes the first few milliseconds of a sound can really define it. And you might not want to actually have that compressed.

Take Tom's for example, the sound of the Tom is really to sound the initial attack the sticks out and then the, the tone of the drum as it resonates, the kind of the T and the boom after that if you set the attack to be really short and stick sound, we'll get compress. If you slow that down, that attacks a little the initial stick sample comes through giving you a much better attack and then the compressed will take care of the boomers Afghan clamp that down, or releases how long the compressor holds on to the sound before it kind of lets go. These are really fine details to go into, you know, particularly when compression, you know is new to you. But most applications just set the attack and release to about halfway or you know, 12 o'clock position, then even press the auto setting if there's a button right there.

Now limiting is really just a compressor that has an infinity to one ratio. Once the signal gets to a certain threshold. It just hangs on to it and doesn't allow the signal to get any bigger than that. It's I mean, it's kind of like the ultimate bouncer at the door. It doesn't let anything get past it above a certain threshold. Some people even call them brick wall limiter.

A limiter is good For a number of applications, one application I use all the time is for in ear monitors. When a musician on stage places an in ear monitor just Milla millimeters from their eardrums, do you really want to, you know, you really want to be sure that the volume doesn't take off with feedback or anything. Place a limit in line with monitors, and it's a great safety barrier for that. Now, gates, kind of like the opposite a noise gate will take a signal and allow you to drop down a threshold and we'll just cut any signal below that right out. It's kind of like an automated mute button. Really great.

The noisy guitarists. Let's take a recording like this. It was taken in a really noisy and you can hear the noise but it's a signal that comes out When the junk still there, above that threshold, it's just masked by the loud material. Okay, let's see how we can use noise gates for drums are brought up a number of tracks from a gentleman I know that actually records that I've got some information and some samples and your bonus disc of some of his work. Basically, you can send in a song and then he's got an entire recording studio set up with drums, and he'll return some drum tracks. Here's some drum tracks that he's out to me as a demo.

Now, here's the deal. We have kick, snare top snare bottom and high hatless system. All right, now. Here's what I want to do, I want to zero in on the kick drum. So while I solo this guy here, he would have closed might that kick drum pulley with an AKG d 12. is like that, and here's the result. So you can hear this kick drum there, obviously.

But there's some other stuff there as well. Now he closed mic. It's not a magic microphone, it can't reject other stuff in the room. But we do have a magic noise gate here and you'll be pretty amazed at what we can do. Now, I kind of hesitate to show you this because some of you guys may not have noise gates, but this is the kind of information that you really need to understand so that people if you ever progress to other pieces of equipment that don't that do have this these kind of effects, you'll know what to do. So here's what I'm gonna do.

I'm gonna scoot up pasta HQ and his at gate settings. So here's just a kick drum. You can hear this and bleed from other stuff there. So here's the first thing we're gonna do. I'm gonna turn the gate on, and then I'm gonna pull the threshold all the way down until we basically have nothing check it out. See too much now brought that down so much, only the very heavy kick drum hits will come through.

And you'll notice that the gate is not completely pulling everything out. You see the gate ranges, it's taking it down 20 db, let's actually take it down the maximum which is 40 Db now we should almost have nothing. Okay, so now what we do is we just raise this guy. Until that is comes in, check it out. Listen to it without it. Now with it You're not getting the end of that kick drum hit.

And what you can do is adjust the release a little bit more, check it out. If we bring that release down, that'll clamp down that gate very quickly. Open up a little bit more sticking here how we can go from this to this. But why why would you want to do this? Well, comes really down to one of the lessons we learned in the last session was you want to isolate the sound. If we let this off, and we started going down here and eat during this channel, are we eating just the kick drum?

No, we're eating some bleed from the from the other stuff, you might not come as a big deal. But if you've got like four or five different channels of drums, it's always a great way to go to just Throw a gate on here. And it's clean each channel up. So therefore, any changes you make on this channel will be completely isolated and you'll zero in on just this kick drum rather than the rest of your drum kit that don't lean on this effect as an excuse to be lazy with setting up your levels or maybe isolating your recordings. It can help but it's not a magic bullet. I mean, imagine if your vocal quietens down to a whisper and it's below the threshold, it's going to get cut out too.

I mean, having said that a noise gate is great for applications where a signal is just inherently noisy like say a guitar amp. It's also perfect for quietening down a vocal track where you have a lot of headphone bleed, you know, coming off the headphone lines in there. A lot of vocalists will slip one headphone cut off their ear to help them keep pitch. If your vocal mic picks up that vocal bleed of the headphones and it can really start to build up especially when you have a ton of vocal tracks. Throw a gate on them and you're good to go. Now, in all three of these effects, think about which method would I like to use either routing or insert.

Yep insert because it's affecting the entire signal with insert these effects in line with our signal EQs our tracks that we use all the time in our daily life we miss the bass and treble on a guitar ancestor as a caster is and they function is either boost up or pull down certain bands across the frequency spectrum. Let's take the most basic EQ we have a typical bass and treble knobs at the 12 o'clock position, we're doing nothing but as we turn that to the right it would grab the treble 10 that's the right we boosting up the high end. A turn to the left would be scooping out the top and the same thing with the bass boost that up could be boosting up the lows or pulling out the lows and That can be used to kind of highlight parts of the mix, maybe the bass track is to boom, you could take a little bit of that out of the bass track, if your vocal is maybe to dial, then you can go to that channel and boost up a little of that top.

And now, having said that, I would always use EQ sparingly, if you need a ton of talking to have your vocal cut through them. That vocal was probably not recorded, well, maybe the talent was too close to a cardioid mic, and the proximity effect was coloring that signal. Maybe you need to pull out some of the maybe the other parts in your mix that competing in that neighborhood. If you're using certainly more than 60 b boost, I would really step back and ask myself, look, what is the problem here with this track, and also the blend of the instruments. So let's look at several of the main types of EQ and a great way to do that visually is to see a quite comprehensive one that's inside reason or corn. On most channel strips if I just screwed this up here, you'll see an EQ section like this.

They made us have a few knobs that they may be quite comprehensive like this one right here. Basically, this is a four band EQ, you have your lows, low mids, high mids, and highs right there. And all of these knobs are basically allowing you to boost an amount and then center where that that frequency is going to be boosted around. Instead of kind of doing this in the dark over here. Here's a better way to look at it over here. This is going to give us a graphical kind of response to exactly what we're going to be doing with this EQ right here.

And you can see that we have our lows to our highs and we'll be able to see what these issues are going to be doing. So let's break them all down here. I said very early on, we're talking about low cats. If you employ this guy here, this will just take a very steep Filter right at 30 hertz and just cut everything below that. I think we showed you that kind of graphic before quite often you'll see that in some microphones. So that's what a low cut will do.

Then we'll talk about as shelving issues, which is on the left hand side and the right hand side. This is analogous, sorry, analogous to this side, and also this side. And here's why they're called shelving. If you will think of this as a bookshelf here, then the book ends would be on the left and the right. And if I was to employ this guy right here, and bring up the game, you can see that we're boosting from this point on down. Up here on the high show, we'd be boosting from that point on up.

Let me just take these guys back to where they were. So let's actually hear what that sounds like. I mean, basically, you're showing EQs are your basic bass and treble. You've got your bass down here and your treble here. On a standard EQ, you'd normally have a gain. So anything past 12 o'clock boosting anything to less would be reducing.

But there's an extra couple of knobs that right here, here's where your frequency will actually be centered around. So if we were to boost that, you can see you can boost that from the very lows, or more into your low mids. So let's hear an actual example of this. That's fair enough. We've seen them before, right just based in trouble. Let me just take these guys out here.

So now we've got as shows bookends taken care of, let's look at the issue in the middle. And basically you have a couple of parametric issues in the middle. And they are called simply peaking you choose because instead of working from a certain point on up or a certain point on down, these guys peak in the middle in kind of a bell curve. So then you can see that we're we are boosting around a particular frequency, which is adjusted right here, you can sweep that up and down, and then you can adjust the width. So how many neighboring frequencies are you going to be affecting, you could either get in a very surgically like this, perhaps to just take out a very narrow notch of frequencies, or you could widen that up and give just a gentle boost at a particular frequency. So let's have a listen to how these these guys sound.

Obviously, that's a lot of gain, we're we're boosting up 18 Db does particular pregnancy. So that's why you're hearing some of that distortion, I would not be boosting that amount of EQ, that's for sure. Take notice some challenges may not have as many knobs here on The Cube may not have as many bands but you can kind of get an idea of what's going on right over here. I have some EQ recipes in your workbooks with examples that you can practice on. There are definitely certain frequency ranges that you should be familiar with. And also Please take note of the tonal character of the material you're dealing with, for instance, boosting 10 k on a kick drum is probably not the worst.

Thing to do because the kick drum does not live up here, right? conversely, boosting 100 hertz on a guitar track is just going to get kind of in the way of the instruments that do live down there. Like the kick drum and the bass guitar. I'm really careful to kind of carve out a lot of stuff down here as that's where that kind of instruments and I need a lot of power to move those speakers. The stuff down here, thumps you in the chest. I listen typically want to get everything out of the way.

So the important instruments have space to use all the energy they need right down here. Anyway, we'll talk about EQ in the mixing section in the next session, but this is kind of a good place to start. Now, a de Esser is a cross between a compressor and an EQ. You want to take a stab at why I chose this graphic. Yes, a DSS squashes certain frequencies. In other words, it is a frequency specific compressive mean heavy Have a notice that some sounds that we produce with our voices are kind of harsh.

That sibilant such as SS and T's that work by rushing air over a pellet. If you go through and speak the alphabet, ABC, you can hear and highlight all of these sibilants. Now notice how harsh the sounds can be, it should be cool if we had a compressor that just zeroed instead of compressing everything to zero it in the nice frequencies that depending on the ID on the individual can be anywhere between about four and 10 K. So D is just compressed a small sliver of frequencies and your job would be to slide around those frequencies until you hear those sibilance start to timed out.