I have talked you about effects in previous posts and videos and how we can use them . Today I want to talk you about a parameter of send effects ,for that reason I want to tell you again about these two categories.
When we say effects, we mean all these plug ins that we use in our mixes. There are two ways for using plug ins. Like insert or send effects. You can see these two categories ,once you open the edit window for each track. In the inserts tab ,you can apply any plug in you want but it is for the specific track and only. So if we want to add a reverb for this track ,you add it on the inserts tab. As you can see in the picture below there are seven slots free to add any plug in you want.
If you want to use a plug in like a send effect ,that means that you can apply the same plug in on more than one tracks. This can be very helpful and practical and it saves you a lot of your pc ram. We just add an Fx track and you send any track you like to this track. Let’s try to create an Fx track together. From the menu bar and the Project tab ,you choose Add track and from there the submenu Fx channel.In Cubase it’s called Fx channel.In other DAWs it’s called Fx track or Aux track.It’s exactly the same. A window pops up ,you have to choose the plug in for this track and you can set to be mono or stereo.
So you have set your plug in and you are ready to send to that effect one or more tracks from your project. Let’s say ,we have a guitar track and you want to send the signal of your guitar to this send effect. In the edit window at your right ,there is the send effects tab. You apply the send effect.
In Cubase and at the most DAWs the send effects have a preset on Post fader. What does that mean? In post fader the send effect comes after the original signal of your recording. So if you turn down the fader of your guitar track ,then you won’t hear the effect also.
If you activate Pre fader though, then it’s like you split the original signal of your recording from the send effect. In that way whatever you do with your guitar track, the send effect stays at the same level. You can turn down your guitar fader ,but you can still hear the reverb from your guitar.
You can try this on your DAW and you can check what works better for you and your projects.