How big is your room and what are the walls made out of?

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1 Objective: By the end of this lab you will be able to hide, display and call up any reverb and to deduce how to load presets and manipulate the various components within a reverb. To be able do duplicate a reverb to other Insert positions. Creating effect Send channels in Pre-fader and Post-Fader modes. Open the AE1_Lab7_Reverb project. It is just Kick, Snare, High Hat, Bass, Keys & Piano. You can use any project you like, but this lab will refer specifically to that session. In previous labs you have been shown how to display Inserts, Sends and I/O. Make sure that at least those three are being displayed. If you don t remember how to show sends, go back to the previous labs and refresh. What is a Reverb and what is its function? The three basic forms of sound are Direct from source to your ears; Early Reflections Source to wall (or other thing) to your ears; Reverb Source to walls, to walls, to walls to other things that eventually happen make it to your ears with no clear sense of where the reflections actually came from. Direct sounds reach your ears first and are more dry where sounds that have reverb on them are rather delayed and are perceived or described as wet in that the environment has added it s flavor to the sound before it hits your ears and has blurred some of the distinctness of the audio. Reverbs function is to give the listener (your brain) a psychoacoustic (pretend) sense of the size of the space and place of where the audio is being performed. Another rule of thumb is REVERB says what the walls of the venue are made of where DELAY says how far away the walls are. There are so many different ways to use reverbs that we have to limit your experience at this level to the fundamental and functionality of reverbs. Once you have understood reverbs to the point where you don t have to think about it, you can then explore the other possibilities of reverbs. Without the basics, the fancy stuff is very difficult to grasp. As a rule, reverbs are the last thing you put into your mix. Because they tend to blur or cover up inadequacies in mixing technique. It is very common for those new to mixing to over use or saturate their mixes with reverb. This is a tell tale sign of a new audio engineer. TOO MUCH REVERB! In the mixing tricks document there is the statement that says Reverbs should only be noticed when they are taken away. Sure, there are exceptions, but generally, reverbs are like a garnish to your meal. They make the overall experience nicer and more fun to listen to than if there were no reverb. It isn t the main course, but it certainly enhances the main course. If you think of mixing like a stuffed baked potato your tracks are the potato, EQ, Compression, Reverbs and all the other stuff you can do to your mix are the fix ns. How much sour crème, bacon, cheese is up to personal taste, but I have as yet to see someone order a bowl of cheese with a light potato garnish. Not that it is impossible, just improbable. There are generally two ways to apply verbs to a mix. One is add it to the channel (instrument track) you want to have reverb on. Too many of these can chow down on your CPU power binding your creative process. The second way is to put the reverb on a BUS and route whatever you want to have reverb on to that bus. This way you can use your sends level to adjust how much of each instrument gets reverb and just how much reverb is making it to your mix. As a rule, reverbs are put onto the last or next to last available insert position. Why? Reverb is a garnish, not a fix. Get your audio sounding good BEFORE you add reverb. Too many amateur mixers use reverb to hide their inability to mix well. If you are displaying Inserts A-E then put the reverb on E. We have covered in previous labs how to display Inserts and how to place plug-ins on those inserts. Bradford Cox Audio Engineering 1, Collin County College Page # 1

You will need to convert your PNO & Keys tracks from dual mono to single stereo tracks, here is how When inserting a new track Pro Tools will place that track just after the currently selected track

2 You will need to convert your PNO & Keys tracks from dual mono to single stereo tracks, here is how When inserting a new track Pro Tools will place that track just after the currently selected track or if no track is selected, the new track goes after the last track. We will do this stereo track creation in two steps. Making sure the buttons in your session match the active (blue buttons) in the picture here. Also, make sure the Keyboard Focus is in the edit window by pressing CMD OPT 1 (the 1 just above the Q key). The orange a/z square will be active in the upper right corner of the edit window. Use the Selector Tools (F7) to highlight the PNO-R track name by clicking anywhere in that track and dragging into the other track. Both track names should be highlighted. Then create a new STEREO AUDIO track (CMD SHIFT N then use the CMD Arrow keys to choose the type and channels of the new track). The new track name will be highlighted. Rename this track to be Piano ST. While still using the Selector Tool, click and drag across both PNO tracks to highlight those track names again. In these next steps it is critical that you don t touch the mouse or inadvertently touch the arrow keys. CMD SHIFT A to select all the audio in those tracks. CMD X to cut the audio on the two mono tracks. Semi-Colon key to move the insertion cursor to the new PNO ST track. CMD V to paste those tracks into the new STEREO audio track. Delete the two PNO tracks (right click or CTRL Click and select DELETE) Repeat these steps for the KEYS tracks so that you end up with two stereo tracks. On the Piano St track, click on the E insert. Go over to Reverb > D-Verb (mono/stereo). This is the reverb plug-in that comes free with Pro Tools. It is not the end all of all reverbs, but if you can wrangle this one, the others are way easy. The factory default settings are adequate, but may not be proper for the kind of room you want to sell to the listener. Naturally, we are going to modify the factory defaults. Also, it is always a good idea to load or at least preview the other factory presets. You never know what you might learn and one of those settings may be very close to what you need. From there all you have to do is slight modifications to the settings as opposed to starting from scratch and creating a bunch of work for yourself. Work smarter, not harder. To cycle through the factory presets click on the - + buttons here: The D-Verb looks like this: Gain = how strong is the signal that is going to drive the reverb. The default is -4dB meaning that the signal hitting the reverb is 4dB quieter than the actual dry signal. Play with this and see how it effects the behavior of the reverb. REVERB = a pre-set collection of reverbs that can be modified by the other parameters. They provide good starting points that you can then tweak to make your own settings. Output is just that. How strong is the signal coming out of the reverb. This is for display purposes only. Can t change it. Pre-Delay = Says how long the reverb should wait before it begins to do it s thing. Good for creating the sense of large spaces or slap-back or rhythmical effects. This works different than a Delay plug-in in Bradford Cox Audio Engineering 1, Collin County College Page # 2

that it just tells the reverb to wait X milliseconds before it starts to apply the reverb. Try it on a snare drum. Decay = How long it takes the reverb to final quit doing what it is doing.

3 that it just tells the reverb to wait X milliseconds before it starts to apply the reverb. Try it on a snare drum. Decay = How long it takes the reverb to final quit doing what it is doing. How long the reverb hangs around. Big rooms with hard surfaces = long decays (mostly). HF Cut (High Frequency removal) = Controls high frequencies in the reverb over time. Frequencies above the HF Cut will decay faster than the frequencies below the Cut point. This simulates what happens in the real world as high frequencies are dampened by the air or the stuff in the air. Notice the frequency response you get on a dry day as opposed to a humid day. High frequencies have a harder time making it through the heavier air. Diffusion = How quickly the sounds shift form the relatively clear Early Reflections to the wash of reverb. You will want to keep this number rather high unless you are going for a special effect. Mix = This slider controls how much of the reverb do you want to hear? From 0% to 100% or another way to say it Full Dry to Full Wet or any blend between. LP Filter (Low Pass Filter) = pretty much says it all. A Low Pass filter is really a High Cut Filter. It rolls off the higher frequencies on the output end (the wet signal) of the reverb only. Using these tools in combination will give you a variety of environments to place your audio. If you put a reverb on one track you will probably want to make the mix less than 100% reverb. Otherwise the sound will be completely washed out. A more common practice of adding reverbs would be to use a BUS or AUX channel. Lets set that up. To put the same reverb on all of the drums you have to put a send on all the drums you want to effect. In previous labs you were instructed on how to show sends A-E only. Make sure you can see the sends. Choose the selector tool (F7) and click on the Kick track. If the insertion cursor highlights across all drum tracks then that would be an indicator that groups are turned on. Turn them off by pressing CMD + SHIFT + G. Press and hold the shift key as you press the semi-colon ; key until you have highlighted across all percussion tracks. You will know this because as a track is selected the background of the track name turns white. Once you have all percussion tracks selected insert a new stereo AUX track. CMD + SHIFT + N for new track. Using the CMD & Arrow keys, select STEREO & AUX and press enter. On that new Green AUX track you need to do several things. First SOLO Safe the track. Solo Safe means Never Muted in that no matter what track is selected for solo, this track will always process audio. It is a good habit, and mandatory for a Pro Tools Expert Exam, to automatically Solo Safe all AUX tracks. Solo Safe is a toggle switch in that if it is on you can turn it off. To activate solo safe all you have to do press and hold the command key (CMD or what some call the apple key) and click on the S button on that track. That solo button becomes grayed out or ghosted meaning that track will always pass audio regardless of the solo status of the other tracks. You can see in the picture below, the solo button on the green track is ghosted out where other track solo buttons are regular. Double click the name of this new AUX track and call it Perc Verb. It is critical to label everything Regions, Tracks, I/Os and so on. Pull Down Menu> Setup> I/O, click on the BUS tab. Click on New Path. Label it Perc Verb Bus. Assign the number of channels to be Stereo, Route it to the next two available channels on the bus. Bradford Cox Audio Engineering 1, Collin County College Page # 3

If you turn the track s fader down, nothing goes out the send. Try it. Sends can be added in the Edit window, but tend to do it in the Mix window.

4 Go to the pull down Setup > Preferences > Mixing tab and in the upper left corner and verify the box labeled Sends default to INF is unchecked. This means that when a Send is created the fader value will be at Unity Gain. Since the default Send audio is Post (after) fader the strength of the send is set by the track s fader position. If you turn the track s fader down, nothing goes out the send. Try it. Sends can be added in the Edit window, but tend to do it in the Mix window. Press CMD + = until you see the mixer come on the screen. On the I/O of that new AUX track, set the input to be the one you just created Perc Verb Bus. The output should be set to the default Output 1-2. Click on the Kick Track name then press and hold SHIFT while you click on the HH01 Track. This will select the percussion tracks. Press and hold the Shift + OPT key and go to Send A. Click and pull down to BUS and select the Perc Verb Bus you created earlier. There will then be a send on all the tracks you selected. The OPT modifier key says do to all and the SHIFT modifier key added to it says do to all Selected. You can use this technique for anything in the I/O of Pro Tools. Try it. If you mess something up you can always Revert To Saved. You are not going to hurt anything. Once you have placed the sends on those tracks a fader will pop up. We need all send faders that are feeding that Perc Verb Bus track. One way to do it is to SHIFT + OPT and click on each of the sends on the percussion track. This will cascade the faders down your computer monitor screen. A slicker and less confusing way would be to press and hold the CMD key and click on A on Send A. If you miss the A they you will just disable that Send, it will have turned blue. If you actually clicked on the A then you will see faders pop up just above the I/O. It looks like this: Pre or Post Fader? Sends can get their strength based on the Track faders or they can be an entirely different mix where the levels leaving the track are set by the Send fader it self (Pre Fader) To change the Send fader to pre fader click on the P button in that send window. This means that if you turn down the track fader to off and leave the send fader up, there will still be audio getting to that PercVerbBus track. Try it. Solo the Kick. Turn the kick fader all the way down and you will see nothing getting to the PercVerbBus channel. Now click on the P button and you will see unity gain making it to that PercVerbBus channel. Toggle it on and off, see what happens. If you want, in Pre fader mode, you can move the fader on the sends to create a totally different mix that would go the send. This is way cool, but requires a bunch more work on your part. Your call. For this exercise leave the sends post fader, meaning that the strength of the send signal is based on the track s fader position. On the PercVerbBus track. Click to Insert A > multi-channel plug-in > Reverb > D-Verb (stereo) Under factory presets, click and select Large Church. This is totally the wrong verb for this situation, but it gives you an idea of how to use the tools. On the PercVerbBus track, the green one, pull that fader down and listen to what happens to the reverb. Then bring it up to a level that is acceptable. Click on the preset Large Church again and select something else. Observe the settings in D-Verb as you listen to what is going on. Try adjusting the Decay time of a large reverb. What happens? Eventually work your way to Short Plate. Pull down the PercVerbBus fader all the way, then add to taste. Pulling the PercVerbBus fader down all the way you only get the dry signal of your drum kit mix. By adding just enough of the PercVerbBus fader you can sweeten the entire drum kit with one reverb instead of having Bradford Cox Audio Engineering 1, Collin County College Page # 4

5 the same reverb across all tracks in your drum kit. The more RTAS plug-ins you have running the more power you suck out of the CPU (thinking engine) of your computer and the slower your computer becomes. By putting ONE reverb on an Aux channel you have lessened the power drain on the computer s main brain. You can put a reverb on an audio track but the only thing it is going to add reverb to is that track and only that track. To control the balance of wet to dry signal you would have to adjust the Mix slider where 0% = no reverb and 100% = only reverb. You could also put a very mild reverb on the master fader so that EVERYTHING gets some reverb. This would be if you were trying to simulate a particular room or live venue. You would have to be very careful not to wash out your entire mix with reverb. Remember Reverb should be noticed when it is taken away. It is not the lead element; it is there to sweeten the lead elements. Less is more in this case. Not enough stinks, too much stinks worse. What is the difference between a reverb and a delay? Google it and you will see thousands of answers, most of them are different from each other. As a rule, you can t go wrong in saying: Reverb A reflection of the original signal The effect is a blurring/blending of the original signal Indicates what the walls are made of Creates the illusion of an actual space Is used to sound natural or super natural Happens within 30ms of the original sound (mostly) Delay A clear repetition of the original signal The effect has distinct repetitions of the original signal Indicates how far away the walls are from you. Can be timed with the tempo of a song Is used mostly as a special effect. Happens after 30ms of the original sound (mostly) Save your work then do a Save As and call it AE1_YourLastName_Lab07.ptx Bradford Cox Audio Engineering 1, Collin County College Page # 5

Audio Engineering Basics Lab 4 Inserts, Sends & Busses

Audio Engineering Basics Lab 4 Inserts, Sends & Busses Objective: By the end of this lab you will be able to hide display Inserts & Sends, put an effect onto that track, route a track to an AUX track, put an effect onto that AUX track and control the blend