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So there's two ways that we're going to use audio effects in our sessions,
and one of them is by inserting them directly onto a track,
which is what I already demonstrated.
That's referred to as serial processing.
So you have to imagine like, a television series.
The one episode comes,
and the next episode and the next episode,
and there is a linear component to it.
That's the same thing on audio tracks.
So if I open up this high hats truck,
so audio is coming from the track into this audio effect and hitting the Auto Pan.
So if I add another audio effect,
and let's add echo right there.
It's going to go from the Auto Pan into the echo.
So I'll just solo this and we can see what the result of that is.
[MUSIC]
I can turn the echo off and we're just getting the pan.
[MUSIC]
Just creating more texture.
So one after the next, after the next,
is what's referred to as serial processing.
So the other approach is to do things in parallel.
We're going to use the send and return functionality in order to do that.
So by default, you probably have a reverb and a delay track set up
for you on the right-hand side of your session, next to the master.
These are return tracks.
So the idea is that audio is going to come out of the tracks into our session
and meet the audio effects that are inserted onto these tracks.
So if I double-click on here, you can see there's a reverb
and then conversely over here, we have a delay.
Then from there, you can see audio is going
to the master track and then exiting out of the output that you've dictated.
So at this point, we're starting to deal with signal flow a little bit more on the tracks.
The way we get audio from these tracks into the return tracks is by using the send knobs.
So we're going to send a certain amount of audio from our track to the return track,
which then goes over to the master track.
So I've taken off the reverbs that I had put on these sampler instruments.
I'm going to just solo this right now,
and we can get an idea of what they sound like when we process
them in parallel with reverb.
[MUSIC]
About halfway up the knob, there's full reverb. Delay.
[MUSIC]
So the question is, what's the difference?
Why would you want to do something in serial as opposed to in parallel?
There's a number of answers to that question.
First off, we might want to have a mix of the wet and the dry signal.
So the wet being, what's being processed on this return track and the dry
just being whatever's coming directly out of the truck into the master.
It does sound different than having an audio effect directly inserted onto this track.
Secondly, time-based processors like reverb and delay give a real sense of space.
Reverb is the amount of time it takes for a sound to reach a wall
or a point of reflection and come back to me.
So it's giving me some an idea of what room this session is living inside of.
You might want all of your tracks all within the same room.
So you can just use one return track, one reverb,
and send all of your tracks to the same space, if you will.
Lastly, depending on how powerful your computer is,
having one reverb is a lot better than having 30 reverbs from a processing standpoint.
The less processing you're doing, the more you can use it for something else,
whether that's different types of audio effects, more virtual instruments,
whatever it is,
you have to balance what your computer's capable of and what you want to do.
So doing things in parallel can save you a lot of CPU as well.
That's the basis of processing both in serial,
inserting things onto tracks and in parallel by sending amounts
of audio to a return track to be processed there and then sent to the master.
As you're going through this process of playing with audio effects,
there's no right or wrong way to do something.
There are ways that people tend to do something.
So in general, time-based processors like,
reverbs and delays and phasers and Flanders,
they do get processed in parallel.
But if you want to insert a reverb directly onto your track
or if you want to see what happens with three or four different types of reverbs,
then you should absolutely do that.
Just be creative.
It's an opportunity for you to experiment and there's no right
or wrong way
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