in this tracktion waveform tutorial i'm going to show you how to use aux
sends and returns so you can use them in parallel processing or whatever you want to use them for
i'll even give you some ideas of how you might want to use them so if you didn't think you needed
this you might want to try it after watching this video i'm zane welcome to simple green tech and
for this tracktion waveform tutorial i'm using waveform 11 pro but you can do this in waveform
free as well in the exact same way so let's jump into this waveform tutorial all right so to do
this you'll need at least two tracks one track will have your audio source on it maybe it's
your vocals or your guitar bass or whatever and this can also be a vst instrument so it doesn't
have to be audio you can use a vst instrument as your source here the next track will be empty so
what we're pretty much going to be doing is copying all the sounds from this track up here
down into this track without having to copy the midi the audio the plugins or whatever
we're just going to be using aux sends and returns so what you might want to do right off the bat is
rename this track here and i'm using a drum plugin for this so i'm going to rename this to
drum send the only reason why you might want to do this is because if your project gets
really big you're really going to appreciate the extra effort that you put in renaming this so you
know what this tracks all about now on the track that has your instrument or your source audio go
over to this area here and you want to right click add new plugin go to waveform plugins
utility and then you want to use an aux send here you click on that and this little window
pops up so by default it's on bus number one and if you don't have any other buses
this is fine so we'll just rename bus number one to drum send and then we can close this down
and now on track two the empty track go over to this area here right click add new plugin
waveform plugins utility and this time we're going to go with an aux return and because it's the only
bus that we're using it automatically finds that drum send but you can see we have other buses
in here as well so now watch what happens when i play the audio back it should output
into this and you'll see the vu meter go up a bit here so that just kind of
makes things louder because we haven't processed anything yet and one thing to note here is if
you are using a vst plugin as your source you want to make sure that the send is on the right
side of the vst plugin or if you put it on this side it's not going to be sending anything out
because the send comes before the instrument and then the same thing down here if you add
any effects like compressors reverb or whatever you want to make sure that they're to the right
of the return so that the sound gets processed if you put them in front then you're not processing
anything because those effects come before the return so why would we want to do this well you
may have heard the term parallel compression well we can do that here or we can add
reverb or any other effect really and sure we could add compression up here and we probably
would add compression to your main drum buss or you could add your reverb or your effect up here
but then you're kind of muddying up your signal a bit by doing this you still have your dry signal
and you can control the levels of that but then down here you can control the levels of that
affected signal so i'm going to add a reverb down here and i'll show you what i'm talking
about i'm just going to use the reverb that comes with waveform and now when we play this back
you can hear that reverb affected sound so now we can adjust the level of that reverb
and now we have our drum kit in a nice space we got some airiness to it with that reverb but it's
not muddying up the drum sound and you can send this to even more tracks so if you wanted to have
another drum send with some other effect on it you can do that as well and one thing you might want
to do after you have the send and the return is to create a sub mix and to do that you would just
click on the track over here hold down control on your computer keyboard and click on the next
track right click over here and go to create sub mix track containing and now we have a sub
mix with both of these in it so if our levels for these two tracks were pretty much where we
wanted but we just want to control the overall level in the mix then we could do that with this
and of course you can add compression or saturation to kind of blend the sounds
together even more that's up to you but this is a nice way to control the levels of both of those in
your overall mix so you're not having to control this and then this fader you're just controlling
one fader so now let's look at another example in a project that i'm currently working on right now
so i have my bass guitar that i recorded in on this track right here i have the send
out as the first plug-in on here if you wanted to send out the signal after the compression and the
eq you can just put the send after those but i want to send the signal before it's compressed
and eq'd on this track and then down here it's the first plugin on this track so the
reason why i'm doing this on my bass guitar i'll show you right now so i've got the main
base eq'd so it's pretty much just the lows let's just listen to what the lows sound like
so that's just the lows on this track here then down here i have a bunch of other effects so i'm
not really affecting the ultra lows i do have a compressor on there and that's about it but i'm
not really affecting the lows at all and then down here i have my return so it's my base bus
then i have amplitube custom shop here that way it sounds like it's going through a guitar
amp where the ultra lows isn't going to sound like it's going through a guitar amp it doesn't
matter they're just ultra lows they're just sort of there to fill up the low end but this track
here is sort of going to be the character for the bass and then here i'm also sending this again
to another track called bass fuzz and that's if i want to dirty up the bass a little bit and i just
have one knob brighter to brighten up the bass a little bit and then this eq here you can see
it starts where the other one ended so here it goes to 216 then here we start at 216. so let's
listen to what it sounds like all together and i don't have that fuzz enabled at the moment
so you can hear all of the character in the bass guitar is coming from
this track here so that's another use and that would be considered multi-band processing as
we're processing the lows here and then separately we're processing our mids to highs all right so
here's another example this time using vocals so i have my vocal sub mix here and in it i have a send
that's going to attract that's outside of the bus and i just call it wide vocals it's
kind of to widen the vocal up and it adds a little bit of delay and some reverb so our vocal stands
out a little more in the mix so here's what it sounds like without the delay and stuff on it
tactic home and toxic work we live in a toxic world all right so there's the vocal and now
we'll listen to it with the send on toxic home and toxic work we live in a toxic world
so again with this we have all of our dry signal but now we're just adding in that
wet signal of the delay and the reverb so our vocals not getting muddied up by having
a delay in a reverb on the main vocal we're instead sending it out and we're going to use
this slider to control how much of that we hear in the mix if you want to check out even more
tracktion waveform tutorials click up here or click down here to see what youtube recommends if you
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thank you so much for watching for simple green tech i'm zane keep creating and we'll talk soon