Okay, on to the salt and pepper kind of effects and that is the delay and the reverb. Now delay is a time based effect that just holds a signal for a certain amount of time and then plays that back or we just we just call it echo right? We all know what echo is. In nature, it happens because it takes time for sound to travel about a foot a millisecond. So if you're say turn 50 feet away from a big wall, then the sound of your voice will travel 250 feet there and 200 feet back for a total of 500 feet, which makes about 500 milliseconds or about half a second. Now, I mean, that's a long echo if the distance is shorter than the echo will be shorter.

And if it bounces off multiple walls, then we could have multiple echoes as well. Now in terms of using delay, in a musical sense, we use it for basically three different applications. Traditional Echo, Echo, Echo, a thickening slap, or to wideness. Now let's check out some examples. The most obvious one is to give an echo to a sound. And typically you want to have this fall on to a beat.

In other words, you want the echoes to be synchronized to the BPM of your song. Listen to this example. I have a vocal, which is solid up here. And what I'm going to do is send that out to an oxen, which is feeding this delay line here, which is actually number two. If I click on that, then I'm sending out a part of this signal, this vocal removed all right there, I've already labeled that there. It's going to be my echo down here.

And as you can see, it's set to 500 milliseconds or half a second. Now I happen to know that at 120 BPM 500 milliseconds will yield as a quarter note, Echo and let's see if my math is good. Yeah, exactly on the money right there. But here's the trick. Imagine someone came in and said, You know what, I think we'd like to change the tempo That song slightly. Here's the deal.

If you start changing this tempo, then this number isn't going to work anymore. But a lot of software applications have kind of seen this problem and realize that computers do math very, very well. So instead of dealing with milliseconds right here, you can set up to do all these calculations in musical steps. In this case, that's four quarter as sorry, four 16th notes, which ends up being a quarter notes. So that's why we're getting exact coordinates. But here's the difference.

If you set this up to musical steps, then if you make any changes here, this delay will just lock in time. Check it out. Let's do a little bit faster. Exactly on quarter notes, let's bring it down. You may ni C is tracking peripherals. In fact, if we went back two more seconds, he can see this word out the quarter notes out of 103 BPM is actually 580 milliseconds.

Now, here's a BPM calculator help work out exactly how many milliseconds, you need to have your delays, sets of all four Exactly. With the BPM in your song. In certain software recording solutions, you can actually set up your delays to the musical measures, like quarter notes, or eighth notes, or whenever example how many milliseconds and a quarter note delay at 120 BPM was you work it out through here, and it's about 500 milliseconds or about half a second, an eighth note delay would be half of that, or two or 30 milliseconds. So the main parameter in delay is the delay time and in the feedback control, which controls how many echoes there are there with a feedback set to zero then you'd have one acre and the further you turn the feed back to the right, the more So here's a good question. How would you route a delay effect using the insert method or an effects loop?

Yeah, actually, the best way to route a delay effect is to an effects loop so that you can add different amounts of delay to each channel by using the old sense. Also, the second way to use delay is to just thicken up the sound with a very short delay Well, not under 100 milliseconds. By having that very short delay it has the effect of basically hearing two different voices rather than one listen to an example of just a singing voice. application of delay is to use it to widen up sounds and Sarah Ville and interesting hat thing happens when echo without echoes that once the delay gets very short, usually around 30 milliseconds, we no longer hear to sound but we hear if we pan the original left, and a very short delay to the right and we can start to widen up the sound can really help widen the sound in the stereo field.

We'll hear an example later on. So delay can be basically using three different applications your typical Echo Echo Echo, under a short delay, which gives us a thickening sound. And then finally, a way to spread the sound out wide in the spirit service field. We'll hear a great example of that in the mixing section. Now, reverb is closely related to the fact reverb can be thought of as nothing more than just a ton of delays. So densely packed together.

We can't even hear those individual echoes, but we have an effect like this. Soft reverb is very closely related ly we'd probably see a lot of sooner parameters and in fact we do we have a decay time which is the length of time that the rubber dies down, we have a parameter that is called pre delay. And that is the amount of time that it takes for us to get these early reflections off the walls. You can imagine it in a room like this, we probably would probably take about 30 or four milliseconds for those initial echoes to come off the wall. And then obviously, there'll be a series of other reflections. We're just bounced around all around the room until it dies down maybe a second or so later.

In most of your observer effects, you'll find a certain setting like a plate, a room or hole we can all imagine a room or a hole, but what the heck is a plate? Well, in the early days, the only artificial way to make a reverb was to use a big metal plate the old guys used to send their signal through and the plate vibrated and gave off kind of artificial reverb. You seem a lot of beggar types as well. Anyway, we kind of fell in love with that kind of sound and some people still prefer it to this day, particularly on vocals. So again, what type of routing would we normally put a reverb on? That's right and affect sleep as is the way to give a different amount of reverb to all of the different channels.

So I mean, why do we use reverb, reverb places as sound into an environment it might be a small room on a guitar, maybe a larger ring and a vocal or a big hole and a snare drum. For the most part, reverb places a sound more often the distance and this can be really helpful to position in 3d space. Something that really only has two dimensions in terms of the steering wheel, the more of it, the more it tends to kind of drift off back behind the speakers. So adding a little bit more reverb to back and back was tends to place them a little bit further back in the mix. It works well. Now this is a bit of a dated effect, but anybody remember the sound That was my favorite part of working go, I used to work in for about two to three years.

And every night when that part came up, you'd see like thousands of hands, just ready to just do that, that drum roll. And here's here's the way to get that sounds actually made popular by your kind of stumbled upon by Hugh padgham, who produced face value, and they put a gate after the reverb. So the whole idea is this is that when you crank up if you have a little reverb, it sounds big, add some more sounds bigger. So you think maybe if I add a whole bunch, it'll sound great. But what happens is those reverb tiles all just layer on top of each other until it just gets doesn't sound good anymore. So again, a reverb what you can do is that you can have this massive burst of reverb and then it cuts off as soon as it gets down below.

Certain threshold. So it ends up being kind of like, like that. So you get this massive but instead of it going, that's good. And this just stops on straight straight out to that. Now, that effect. If you are wanting to get that pro con sound, that massive drum sound, there's a couple things to do.

Gated reverb works really well. Another thing is that he took Texas heads, bottom heads on such a single head on the top, no heads on the bottom of his drum. And loose tuning man is like his head almost flapping. So it's just a great way to get that sound. Now I've grouped together a bunch of or a number of different effects in this category that I'll call modulation effects. They're called modulation effects because they're parameters within a modulating over time and kind of like a wave like fashion.

Now, the first thing that we'll talk about is the chorus effect. It's achieved by Placing a really short delay, usually around 20 milliseconds or so and moving the length of that delay back and forth, very slightly dislike, you're tweaking it by hand. He's probably the most famous example here. That really kind of thickens up the sound. It's not unlike a 12 string guitar. That's the only kind of application we hear in the real world.

Now, the application of course effects typically, to bring more voice to a sound other words to kind of artificially create a chorus. Typical applications are background vocals, guitars, and keyboards. Now an effect that is closely related to chorus is the flange flange, it takes a slightly shorter delay and ramps up the feedback to give you a sound like this. Pretty cool stuff. In fact, Eagles did on like last night as well. Now another modulation effect is the phaser phaser.

Combined with a copy of the original signal, it's slightly out of phase and sweeps them back and forth against each other to give you this kind of sound. Now all these effects use what is called a low frequency oscillator or an LFO. for short. This has a wave like effect that changes unless something about the sound in the course it'll add the wave effects to the right time plan to the same, the phaser sweeps the base of the signal. There's probably a few more in this category, probably tremolo and vibrato, they sweep volume and pitch respectively even wow is probably in this category, even though it's your foot working as the LFO there. So out of all these effects, I would say that chorus is probably On my short list of effects that I might use, every day, a pitch shifter shifts the pitch of a sound that was pretty obvious, right?

I can either do this in what I would call a dumb way or an intelligent way, you could either shift the pitch of a sound in whole steps, or in in fractions of SME time. In other words, incense. Now if we're going to be shifting the pitch of a sound in actual semitones, then it will do just in a dumb way, maybe you could bring it up a seven semitones, which would bring it up a fifth. So if you're saying it would be go da da, da, da. If you're saying ba, ba, ba, ba, it would just go up a dumb interval. And probably the dumbest pitch shift is an octave which is great on a fretless bass.

If you ever put a fretless bass through an octave, it dropped down octave, who is from Jakob historia stop. It's really really cool. But in terms of pitch shifting. Like I said, it can obviously be dumb, it can just go up a certain number of semitones or it can be very intelligent. check this thing out. Harmony sounds great, Laura.

Thanks. So tell me about your arrangement. So that's a song by the rescues. And in that particular song, there are two guys and two girls in the band. And in that particular song, they have two females and a guy singing. So I wanted to recreate that by having A female come in first below me as an alto.

That's interesting. And then in the chorus kick in the guy and the girl boasting below the melody right? So it sounded really more full. Yeah. So you adjusted the genders to make the female sound more female? Yes.

Yeah, exactly. Can you give us an example where it sounds like that's cool. You just have the gender so that the lower voice Yeah, sounds female. That's really cool. That's Well, that's true. The other part this is where males and females are singing both of them below you two triples below you.

Yeah, the third below the fifth below. Exactly. Okay. Beautiful. Yeah, that's great. But you could also adjust if you wanted to, you could make the singers be on top of you.

Yeah, like a third or fifth above or 35th below but because you're a female saying your voice is not showing a high range. So I wanted them actually below Yeah, that's great. Very cool, huh I just love the way it does all that automatically and even it will take the output of your guitar and work out your your harmonies right from there. So, like I said it can take a pitch or a pitch and shift it up or down. But another way to use it is to do very, very slight pitch shifting and this has been called a split harmonizer for a long time. If you want to make a vocal sound a whole lot wider, then what you can do is put your vocal through a harmonizer or a pitch shifter and bump it up just a couple of cents and pan it out to the right sends down panning out to the left.

And that can stretch out your vocal there. Here's the thing. And this is a common theme across a lot of your effects, you need to trick your brain into thinking something is a little different, if you will, is to copy a vocal track and pay a copy a vocal tract is here and then pan the copied vertical over there another copied vocal over there. Then here's what happens. Your your ear mind combination just listens those says they're exactly the same thing and collapses it back between the stereo field right there trick is you need to make them slightly different we can do this in delay or in in this split harmonizer thing. If you can just change the pitch just slightly that way in that way, then it your mind believes that and then you can stretch that vertical out scrap of backing vocals.

Okay, onto auto tuning. amount number of years ago, when we started getting into drum machines, drum machines became older, right, there was a way to programming them, that would allow you to auto correct the timing so that if you played slightly ahead of the beat or behind the beat, it could scoop it up so that all your beats were like right on the money. And before that time, there was never any perfect drum tracks. I mean, there were there were dramas with excellent timing, but this was down millisecond precision drum tracks, and a lot of people reacted by saying it was kind of creepy, it was a little bit too robotic. And a few years ago, some bright person thought we could do the same thing with tuning that we could, instead of moving things temporarily in time like that, we could move things up and down in pitch.

Imagine you saying a few notes here and you hit the first one right on cue. Next one is a little flat. Next one's a little shop. Next one's a little flat. Then here's the deal, or attorney will take those bits and distribute them up and down until they're right in pitch. Now, here's here's the trick about auto tuning.

Even though you get dis crazy effects that have been used by Cher and T pain, and you're probably most predominantly used by those guys, then if you want that kind of effect, you can do that by making that the speed at which that auto corrects and happens very, very quickly. If you slow that down, it does end up being more than a human life. But here's an example of someone taking a little bit too far was this thing where ancient ancestors hosted the Latin Grammys? pitcher Santana Hall on this sucker. Oh, I wouldn't touch that. All right.

Please be quiet. Silence. Oh, you should sit on this. So you get the idea behind auto tune. We all hear that, you know, we hear on the radio and quite often when we do hear it some people might have an adverse reaction to it say I don't really don't like the sound of that. But I'm telling you there's a lot of auto tuning on the radio that you don't hear.

And it's almost like effects in movies that have a friend that does effects in Hollywood and a lot of movies. He was telling me it's amazing how many movies that he does effects on. They're not the sci fi movie. They're just regular movies that no I need unless just do something artificial and then that you're not even aware of them. So just dialogue, chick flick movies that have all these special effects in it. I'm telling you auto tune can be used that way.

It doesn't have to be completely robotic. Here's another example of it. I got a nice I didn't know you had it. Sometimes Yeah, you're so cute and wicked. So, okay, so that was hard tuning right? And what we call hard to know, but other people may know may know what is auto tuning.

Right? And you set the key. Correct to follow your voice, right? Yeah. Okay, so then in that case, did you have to think differently when you were doing it? Yeah.

It's kind of cool. How you how you Learn to sing without a tune. Because Yeah, you know, you can sing normally, of course, it's fine. But when you really want to accentuate accentuate the effect where it really flips between those notes, you want to do lots of quizzes, right? So you tonight it's gonna be a good night. So to do that, nah, nah, you do that with your finger?

Yeah. You don't get the effect as much. So yeah, you have to change it a little bit you can you change it up a little bit. But what's cool also about some of the TC helicon technology, it'll follow the guitar chords you're playing. And then you don't have to set the key at the beginning of the song, right? So my, my, my gigs, I use that in some songs when I feel like it'd be like, you know, it'd be really fun to do this verse in Barnard, called the preset just start playing.

And it ain't like we only hear that on the radio. Yeah, this is such a modern, stunning effect, and it's all over now. You thought that was sure it was going to die after that, or we run we were so wrong. Okay, so hard tuning, auto tuning, whatever you want to call it, it's taking your voice and kind of pushing the just pitch correction originally was pitch correction was originally intended to make you sound better and more in tune naturally, right transparently. But, you know, that's one thing we can do. But this is the opposite of that.

So like an effects like reverb or delay, and pretty soon everybody's gonna have it. There you go. Now, there are a few auto auto tunes out there. And in fact, I think this is called pitch correction. I think even Antares actually owns the trademark on it. But yeah, you can check them out.

Some of these software applications have been built in even some of the hardware recorders have some of that built in. So I have my lead vocal track here I have it sewed up and inserted within this channel. I have propellerheads Records. Neptune, which is their pitch adjustment tool with that inserted in this guy this entire vocal is going through here and basically all the pitch correction tools, they kind of do the same thing. Here's what they do is they analyze the signal and then realize kind of what ballpark it is in within semitones. Or you can even get more creative with it up here with scales, but let's just leave it on chromatic.

So, in other words, if you're a little flat or a little sharp, it will zero you in on that exact note. Here's how it sounds check it out. If you catch setting doesn't sound like CPA right here's the deal with all these guys. This is the magic knob right here. This turns it from being very natural to being very share ish if there is such an adjective. Here we go.

You me uni life. match. So check it out. That's really the parameter you want to go for if you're really into dance music and you want to have that effect, then make your correction speed very, very fast. Otherwise, if you slow that down, you'll get a much better result from it. By the way, you can have a whole lot of fun in these guys here.

Let me just put this back to its its regular parameter here. But here's some of the things you can do. My wife is gonna kill me for this, because it's her voice that I'm mangling, but it'll be okay. Okay. Jake's sounds a little funky right there. But here's some of the things you can do to actually change the transposition of this.

This book, we'll check it out. Let's go back to the beginning here. And here's what it sounds like in the mix. I can transpose that. That sounds funky because I haven't got formats selected right here. Now that'll sound better.

Obviously out of turn, right? But you can imagine if you went through these roll many strikes here, if you were to transpose all those guys, that would be very easy to just transpose this, you know, more than three semitones away, it starts to sound a little a little dodgy. But certainly if you had a whole bunch of backing vocals that you want to transpose boy, I do that in a heartbeat. If there is a little bit further down in the mix, you really can't hear those. Those changes being made. But I mean, you can get really silly you can change modulation everything.

Check it out. Man, she's gonna kill me think I'm joking. Now that sound like what was the Jane Fonda and I'm with a father of Katharine Hepburn. That's Sunday sounds like that. Again, I'm going to get killed. So all of these effects can either be placed in line with the signal or in an effects loop.

The rule of thumb is that if you want to just attach an effect, we'll debit effects then using effects, which would be the best way to route. If you want to completely take control of the entire thing, like a compressor or auto tune, for example, then the insert method method would be the best. Also, the effect loop gives you more bang for the buck because you can use that one effect across many channels by using oxygen and return this really goes to your budget, as in that real world example of my 2000 Non renewable I told you about ain't no way I'm going to use that on just one track right, I want to put that across an effects loop that I can use it in varying amounts across all my tracks. Now this is much less of a concern for you guys and gals who use software solutions as your effects are virtual you can just drag and drop unlimited instances of your effects across.

So you might want to just add one reverb in line with a single track you can always adjust the blend of dry to reverb signal on that mix knob right there. In fact, that's probably one good reason to go over to software recording for a few hundred bucks. You are completely done with buying effects. Everything is built in and you have an unlimited effects that just that one price. Now in the hardware world, most modern tracks have built in effects and they normally have a say a loop effect or two most commonly being say reverb and delay. The men might have Insert a text that you can place in line with your signal, which ties perfectly into a discussion of whether you want to record with a text or not we commonly set this way do you want to print your effects or not?

And here's some pros of printing effects. If you have one insert effect like a lot of br records by Boston, then was only one effect. You can use it many different times as your record. If your first track is a guitar, then you can set it to distortion and record that distorted guitar on the track one. Now that effect has basically been recorded or printed. There's nothing to stop you from switching that effects to a chorus and putting on your bass guitar as you record that on the track number two, then maybe a compressor as you record vocals on the tracks when you can set something else record that on track for that as you're recording and printing that on each track.

You have the benefit of using that insert effect as many times as you want. There's many different types of presets as you want but what is the possible downside? Absolutely birth affects a married to that track. Once you record with it, you can't underscore the guitar is on there for good. If you have unlimited effects, then over record everything dry and just add effects at mixcloud. I mean, does that make sense but for many of us, we don't have unlimited effects.

So we tend to use insert effects and print their effects onto a track. Certainly the loop effects can be added and taken away easily as they're never recorded just added in varying amounts by using the orcs sense. So here are the points to remember in terms of effects, effects, Rs spices, and just like in cooking, there are spices you use all the time, and others that are really underused occasionally for a specific dish, as salt and pepper spices, in terms of effects are time based effects, the delay and reverb and they use On most projects, sometimes for special effects, but mostly just to place your sound element into a space or an environment, we have ADD dynamic effects that can be used creatively. But really, for the most part, they're used to control the dynamics of a signal so that we can easily position them. In a mix.

We have noise guides that are great for cleaning up the sound if you have some maybe some noise on a signal or any other background sound that you really want to get rid of. What else do we have or we looked at the different types of EQ and how to use them creatively modulation effects that can change the sound of a track in a wave like way using an LFO also pitch shifters to either create artificial harmonies or widen out the sound with a very slight D tune. Auto Tune is the way to automatically tune a pitch sheet Sing out or use for credit purposes like share and Will Ferrell you You don't often hear those in the same sense, right. And finally, we learned whether to print or not to print. And that's always a better not to print if you had unlimited effects, you'll always have the original sound that you can change up with effects that we've realized that practically, we need to pretty often.

Given the limits of some of that effect setups, we may need to print some of these guys. And last but not least, we learned what our check loop is an insert routing and why we really need both. If you want to control the whole signal, then the insert method would be the best. But if you just want to dabble a touch of a fix shit over a whole bunch of different tracks in a fixed loop, using an oxen and return is the way to go.