Leaderboard

When do you use inserts: for distortion, EQ, compression, chorus, flanger, phaser. When do you use sends: for reverb, delay. When are there exceptions: any time you want 'm. You can use compression as a send effect to get something called parallel compression. These are rules of thumb, and rules can and should be broken if you learn something from them. Chorus (or plain old oscillator detuning) can make the sound wider, but at the same time it can get weaker, because it's cancelling itself out in terms of phase. Reverb lets a focused sound compete with a smeared copy of itself; naturally, when the copy gets stronger, the sound is less focused. You camouflage the transients. In the end, all you're doing is controlling the ratio of dry and wet. Send effects aren't "better" in this regard. It's just that you start with 100% dry and sum a wet signal on top of that. Let's say you have 100% dry and 20% send; the total is 120%. 100% is 100/120*100 = 83% of that, so the signal is 100 - 83 = 17% wet. This is effectively not different from using an insert effect and setting the wet/dry to 17% wet. The difference comes in once you start adding other tracks, because then you get something you can't do with insert effects. The other difference is that 20% on an insert is not the same as 20% on an aux send, so you'll indeed hear more of the dry signal. "You have too much reverb" is an oft-heard complaint. Reverb is like MSG for the sound; it makes everything better. However, you usually don't notice that you're using too much of it. You can use a reverb as an insert effect. The downside is that if you have two tracks and you use two distinct reverbs, it sounds pretty unrealistic; you can't have one instrument sounding like it was recorded in a small tiled room and another in a concert hall. That ruins the illusion. If you use exactly the same reverbs, they may still mismatch, because the result of two dry instruments playing in the same room is not identical to summing two instruments each playing in their own room. What aux does, effectively, is that it creates a submix. Let's say you have a dry mix of guitar, bass and drums. Drums are set to 100% volume. Guitar is set to 60%, bass to 80%. That is the mix that you hear. With auxes, you can make the mix completely different; on an aux you create a duplicate of the mix that may be set to guitar 100%, bass 40%, drums 20%. That is the duplicate mix that you send to an effect (any kind of effect). The effect will "hear" that mix completely different from how you're hearing it. The end result is sent back to the mixer as if it were a single stereo track, and summed with the original. If you're using a reverb effect, the guitar's wet/dry mix may be a lot stronger than that of the drums, but since everything is still in the same "room", it'll do more to suggest positioning (i.e. how close to the microphone was the instrument). Panning is in that sense not different from any effect. Experiment! Keep things simple initially; just a few tracks. Try all combinations. You'll learn a lot.

I use sends most of the time, for a few reasons. Apart from saving some CPU power, it also helps to glue the sound together (in the case of reverb and delay) when you send all your instruments to the same reverb sends. More importantly, using a send means you can process just the effect. A very common and incredibly useful thing is to EQ the reverb to get rid of some mud. I usually put an EQ after the reverb and cut out everything below 200Hz to prevent a messy sound, and sometimes I also high shelf it to prevent it from sounding thin. Optionally you could also choose to EQ the sound before it gets to the reverb, to remove some nasty frequencies. What I wouldn't do is to use a different AUX/bus for every single instrument, that's not very useful. Just stick to a limited set of sends and use those for all instruments, I'd say. Personally I use 3 reverb busses (one for early reflections, one with a plate reverb and one with a hall reverb) and 1 bus for delay, which I use for almost all of my tracks. For the few times I have an instrument that needs some dedicated processing (e.g. a fancy delay or a long shimmer reverb), I typically add those directly as an insert effect. I usually leave the pan of the sends at 0, but a nice trick is to put a widener (e.g. with the Ozone Imager) on just the reverb so only the reverb gets widened, which makes for a subtle but enjoyable effect. Last but not least, I don't bother switching off the effects in the VSTs/synths. I might tone down the effects a bit if it's too much, but I usually leave them as-is and apply my reverb busses to it. When working with orchestral samples, these tend to be all over the place. Some of them are very wet, some of them very dry, some of them in between. For a homogenous sound I usually end up applying some reverb on the master bus to put them all in the same space. That trick might work for your instruments too, but for synth sounds I usually don't bother and just stick to my regular busses.

@GuJiaXian In case you were curious, it just got approved this morning for a direct-post. Those are by email, so this would not show up in the Judges Decisions page.

Good news! I learned how to embed. The piece is largely more complete than it was. At this point it is much more full in textures and feels a lot less like a bunch of individual segments. Things to do: Finalize the thematic ideas Do more with video sync (making sounds represent actions on screen). Making things more consistent throughout, articulations mainly. Clean up the notation and check for practicality (it is playable as it is, but are there places that could be simplified for the same effect). Write a piano and guitar part of some significance that contributes to the piece as a whole.

Currently:

I'm listening SD3 Songs of Light and Darkness!!! Ha-ha!! You may check only demo for now..

Found out the composer for The Mummy: Demastered was an artist called "Monomer". I've been checking out his stuff lately, he's damn good.

Music from this old game, which has surprisingly strong longing night melody

DJPretzel turned in his track ahead of schedule! Yes!!! And it is pretty damn amazing! Also, for those who have been keeping track of the track listing, do you SEE all that bold green?! We are looking at the light of the end of the tunnel now. This three year journey is finally coming to a close! Skies of Arcadia fans, I sincerely hope you are ready!