{"id":26,"date":"2019-07-01T11:26:00","date_gmt":"2019-07-01T11:26:00","guid":{"rendered":"\/blog\/post\/2019\/07\/01\/Another-Way-to-Skin-an-FX-Send"},"modified":"2019-07-01T11:26:00","modified_gmt":"2019-07-01T11:26:00","slug":"another-way-to-skin-an-fx-send","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/2019\/07\/01\/another-way-to-skin-an-fx-send\/","title":{"rendered":"Another Way to Skin an FX Send"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Modern digital audio workstations offer a plethora of ways to solve your mixing and routing problems. Inspired somewhat by <a href=\"https:\/\/www.soundonsound.com\/techniques\/cakewalk-sonitus-effects\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Craig Anderton\u2019s latest column in Sound on Sound<\/a>, I discovered a new way to apply reverb selectively to multiple tracks, in <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bandlab.com\/products\/cakewalk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Cakewalk By BandLab<\/a> using the Sonitus Reverb VST. Here\u2019s my use case:<\/p>\n<p>I have Lead and Backing vocal tracks, and I want to apply a long-tail reverb to portions of the verse and chorus phrases. (The main sustained notes provide a wash of reverb in the background, but keeping it clean and un-muddled by fricatives and fast syllables.)<\/p>\n<p>In the past I have created a \u201cVOX FX\u201d Buss, put an instance of Sonitus Reverb on it, and directed it to feed the \u201cVOX\u201d main buss. Finally, I add a Send on each vocal track to feed the VOX FX, and use \u201cSend Level\u201d automation on each track:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/image_22.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"749\" height=\"269\" title=\"image\" style=\"border: 0px currentcolor; border-image: none; display: inline; background-image: none;\" alt=\"image\" src=\"http:\/\/www.prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/image_thumb_9.png\" border=\"0\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>This works well, and allows the automation curves to be adjusted per-track.<\/p>\n<p>But what if you have more than two tracks, and per-track envelopes isn\u2019t needed? Could there be a way to send audio to the reverb using a single automation curve? I experimented with using an Aux track, intending to add a send on each vocal track to the Aux track, then use the \u201cAutomated Send To FX Buss\u201d trick described above. <\/p>\n<p>However, I realized that I could simplify things by putting the reverb effect on the Aux track itself, and then automating the \u201cVST Input Level\u201d instead:<\/p>\n<p>From the Edit Filter selector (displaying \u201cClips\u201d by default) we can drill down into the Sonitus Reverb and select \u201cInput\u201d from the automation choices:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"745\" height=\"323\" title=\"image\" style=\"border: 0px currentcolor; border-image: none; display: inline; background-image: none;\" alt=\"image\" src=\"http:\/\/www.prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/image_23.png\" border=\"0\"><\/p>\n<p>Now we can draw the automation envelope (only one is needed) to control the amount of audio from all tracks being processed by the reverb:<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"754\" height=\"295\" title=\"image\" style=\"border: 0px currentcolor; border-image: none; display: inline; background-image: none;\" alt=\"image\" src=\"http:\/\/www.prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/image_24.png\" border=\"0\"><\/p>\n<p>This gets the job done, and no need for a general purpose fx buss.<\/p>\n<p>As I mentioned above, there are good reasons NOT to do it this way \u2013 but it is nice to have the option.<\/p>\n<p><strong>UPDATED 27 Sep 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>It seems you can\u2019t \u201cfreeze\u201d an AUX track, so if you find yourself in the resource crunch and the FX bin on the Aux track is CPU-heavy, well, that\u2019s another good reason not to use this technique.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Modern digital audio workstations offer a plethora of ways to solve your mixing and routing problems. Inspired somewhat by Craig Anderton\u2019s latest column in Sound on Sound, I discovered a new way to apply reverb selectively to multiple tracks, in Cakewalk By BandLab using the Sonitus Reverb VST. Here\u2019s my use case: I have Lead [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cakewalk-sonar","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prodigalsounds.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}