yes you can use your hardware effects in tracktion waveform just like you're using an effects plugin
and maybe you want to use a guitar pedal to beef up a synth line or maybe you want to use some
hardware rack units to add some analog character to your tracks this is all possible and in this
video i'm going to show you how easy it is to set up i'm zane welcome to audio tech tv where
it's my goal to help you conquer the tech so you can unleash your creative beast now before we get
into tracktion waveform and get into setting this all up i just want to talk about the hardware that
you're going to need first because you can't do this with just any audio interface you're going to
need an audio interface with at least four outputs so something like the focusrite 2i4 would work and
there's quite a few others and the number of outputs you need depends on the number of hardware
effects that you want to add so if you have four outputs two of those will be used for your
monitor speakers or for your headphone outputs so output one and two are your main stereo outputs
for listening to your song while you're working on it you need those too then if you have three
and four as your outputs you can connect a hardware unit if it's just a mono hardware unit
you can connect one to output three and then you can connect another one to output four then of
course you're going to need a hardware effect of some sort it could be a guitar pedal stompbox or
maybe it's something like this a hardware compressor for this demo i'm going to be using the
zoom multi effects guitar pedal here and then you'll need a couple of cables so you're going
to need a cable to go into your audio interface and one coming back out and the type of cables
that you need all depends on the hardware unit that you're connecting for this i'm just going
to use some standard guitar cables if you're using something like a compressor or some sort of rack
gear i recommend getting some balanced cables to keep some of the noise interference out but
having said all of that let's look at connecting this all right so basically what we want
to do here is create a loop with our audio interface so we're going to connect one cable
that's going to go in our output of our effect and that's going to go into the input of our audio
interface and the next cable is the input of our effect unit and this is going to the output of our
audio interface and with it connected like this i can send the output from a track in waveform
to the effect and then have it come back into waveform allowing us to use it just like we would
use an effect plugin and it is that easy once we have it all set up all right with the hardware all
set up we can now go into tracktion waveform and set it up in there but first i just want to ask
if you're getting some value out of this video can you please give it a thumbs up it really helps my
channel and i appreciate it so much now let's get into waveform all right with waveform open we want
to go to settings and then you want to go to your audio devices section make sure you're using asio
as your audio device type and make sure whatever your audio interface is selected as your device
and once you have that selected you'll notice you have all of your available channels over here
so you have your outputs on top and your inputs down in the bottom section so if your inputs and
outputs aren't enabled you can see they're disabled here i'm actually using the adat
input 3 and output 3 for this demo and you can see it's disabled both here and there so i would just
want to click on where it says disabled and now it's enabled and the same thing down at the bottom
i will click on enabled but you're also going to notice that it's three and four so it's
kind of created a stereo pair here so let's click on our output and down in the bottom section here
it says treat as stereo channel pair let's unclick that and now we can also give this an alias or a
name so i'm going to call this zoom guitar effects and we're going to do the same thing
down in the input so click on it unclick treat as stereo channel pair and then go down to the alias
i'm going to call it zoom guitar effects if you really want you could name it input and output
but it's not really necessary because it only allows you to use inputs as inputs and outputs
as output so you're not going to get confused when we get into the project speaking of which this is
all done in here now so we can open a project so i have a project open here and i have a guitar
track that was recorded just with a di going directly into the audio interface so there's no
effects on this it wasn't recorded through an amplifier or anything it's just the raw
guitar recorded directly into the audio interface and here's what this sounds like
all right it's pretty dull so we want to add the effect on here so go over to this
section of the track right click on it then you want to click on add plugin to the left
and then you go to waveform utility and we want to click on insert and with this
window open we can actually name this so i'm going to name it again zoom guitar effects
and then you want to go to your send device so i'm going to go to zoom guitar effects you can see
that in here and return device again zoom guitar effects and then the next thing we want to do is
click on this auto detect and what this is going to do is adjust our latency because there's going
to be a bit of added latency for sending a track out into our hardware effect and then going back
in and this is going to adjust things to allow for that so let's click on run test and you can
see we have 41.866 milliseconds and we just want to click on apply for that and that's done so
now what i can do is just press play and we're going to hear it with the guitar effect on it
alright so that's just one of the patches in here let's change that up to something else
see what this sounds like all right that's pretty messed up
that one was kind of cool and i've got a lot of different effects in here
so that's really cool i've just added a guitar effects pedal kind of like
how i would add an amp sim plugin but this brings it out into a hardware unit which is
really cool and don't think that you have to use a guitar pedal on just guitars add it to a synth
track or maybe even try it out on some drums whatever you want experiment with some sounds
and this is a great way to really create your own sound and to introduce some analog effects
into your projects now if you want to check out even more traction waveform tutorials click the
video on the screen right now or click the one under it to see what youtube recommends if you
liked this video please give it a thumbs up also subscribe to the channel for more videos like this
thank you so much for watching for audio tech tv i'm zane keep creating and we'll talk soon