Overview of audio effects

This tutorial will be a demonstration of effects in Adobe Audition CC.

All right.

What are effects?

Effects are like little mini programs that you can apply to clips or to tracks in a multitrack session that cause the audio to sound different.

It might be more trebly or more bassy or have a little bit of reverb like in a cathedral or something or echo like you're shouting across a canyon.

Stuff like that.

Those are effects.

You find effects inside - oddly enough - the Effects menu.

And here are the categories of effects from Amplitude and Compression down to Time and Pitch.

And each one of these categories has some number of effects in it.

There are smaller effects here as well inside the Effects menu.

These are effects that you click on them and they just happen basically.

And then here a couple other categories VST and VST 3 that are empty, because you have to put stuff in there.

You can go online and find what are called VST plugins and install them in Audition CC.

And they will appear here.

And I'll talk about VST at the end of this little tutorial.

So let's just take a look at some effects.

Some are complex, some are simple.

We'll take a look at a simple one, like this guy called Vocal Enhancer...

Here your options are pretty straight forward.

Is it a Female vocalist?

Or a Male vocalist?

Hmm.

Difficult to figure that one out.

Or we can move on to things a little more complex, like under Amplitude and Compression.

Go to the Multiband Compressor... and check out this little guy. - If I were to play this...

You can see what's going on there.

And I have the preset set to Walkie Talkie.

Here I'm going to change some of these presets to other presets.

And you get a chance to see how this effect will work.

Things like that.

And as you change those presets, the settings here change as well.

And then they give you kind of a starting point if you want to change them further.

So this is a more complex effect that works inside Audition CC.

And almost every effect has some number of presets that the folks at Audition CC just set up and then gave them a name that they thought represented what that preset sounded like.

Okay.

So when you have an effect, how do you apply it?

Let me show you that.

You can apply it to an entire clip or to part of a clip right here inside the waveform view of the editor panel.

You can also apply effects not only to the waveform view, but to the Spectral Frequency Display view and the Spectral Pitch view.

But typically you work inside the waveform view.

And when you apply an effect here, you are applying it directly to the file.

This is called destructive editing.

You're going to change the file.

And so you need to be careful, if you do change it that you save it under a new name.

Or just beware, if you just save it under the original name you're going to replace the original clip.

Let me show you how to do that.

For example: You go to Effects.

And you go to, let's say, Delay and Echo and pick Analog Delay...

And you can preview it; which is nice.

Get this kind of delay there.

And if you like it, then you click Apply; and then it'll apply to the entire clip.

If you want to apply this to part of a clip, you can select that part and apply it to that part.

And the rest of the clip will not be affected.

I'll close out of here.

We'll just bypass that process now.

If you want to apply an effect sort of above the clip, not directly to the clip and apply it to sort of try it out and see if it's working and maybe you want to make some adjustments later, use what's called the Effects Rack.

Now the Effects Rack is over here to the left.

The Effects Rack is the same whether you're working with the waveform view or the Spectrum Frequency Display or the Spectral Pitch Display.

This little Effects Rack sits over here waiting for you to add effects to it.

You can have up to 16 effects applied to any single clip.

I have to use the word "apply" carefully.

You're not really applying it to the clip.

You're layering it above the clip.

So for example I'll just open up this little slot here.

I'll pick that Delay and Echo guy again.

Now it's residing in that slot.

We can try it out.

Let's see what sounds like again.

I'll try a different effect.

This time we'll try Drain Pipe.

Cool.

So then if you just close this guy you have now layered it basically above this clip.

You have not applied it to the clip itself, but it will play.

It'll have its effect when you play this clip.

And you can add more effects here as well.

And then you can rearrange them if you want.

You can turn them on and off.

Try with it on now.

Off.

You can turn them on and off.

However you want to sort of play with them to see how they work.

Let's say you decided: "You know, I don't really like that particular version".

I can always just double click on it and try a different preset like Canyon Echoes instead.

Close this guy down and now this guy has been changed.

So you can just change them and keep on going until you find something you like.

There's one little button down here at the bottom that says Apply.

So at some point you'll need to apply it to this clip, if you're going to want to use it elsewhere.

So there is the option to apply it down there, but until you click Apply, it's just sort of hovering above it - if you want to look at it that way.

Let's switch over to the Multitrack session over there.

Things are a little different.

Now remember back in the waveform, we've got Analog Delay applied to the lead vocal.wav track.

If I go over to the Multitrack session, here's a lead vocal.wav clip.

But no.

That effect is not there.

It's not on the Clip Effects side of thing or the Track Effects side of thing.

It's independent of what's going on inside the Multitrack session.

Whatever I did over there will not play here. - I'll select her.

No effect whatsoever has been applied to her here.

If I were to go back to the waveform and click on that word Apply, then it would be in the file.

When I go back to Multitrack I would hear it, but right now, they are two independent things.

So I can do the same process here inside the Effects Rack for the Multitrack session.

I can apply an effect like an overlay to the clip, any clip inside a track.

But let's say I've got like 40 clips to the track here, I can apply an effect to the entire track.

And it will apply to all the clips in that track.

Now as I showed you before, there are presets available in each individual effect.

But in the Effects Racks, the one for Multitrack session and the one for the waveform editor, there are presets as well.

These work differently though.

I've got Track Effects turned down now.

I'm going to click the drop down list.

These guys are presets that incorporate multiple effects with properties within those effects change to create a certain kind of sound.

So let's just say we have Far Away Source here.

I do that, it puts three effects here and pops up this little warning.

It says: One of these effects is processor-intensive.

Okay, well, thank you for the warning.

That's the red one.

Whenever you see a red one, that means that this guy is going to push your processor.

And you might want to do what's called pre-rendering, which is a little button down here.

So, we've applied these three effects to this track.

Let's see what that sounds like.

There you go.

So those three effects lead to that kind of faraway source feeling that some Adobe engineer worked out for this guy.

So you can see that you can apply effects here.

There is no Apply button down here.

The Multitrack session is a non-destructive editing environment.

Nothing you do here will change an original clip.

That's important to know.

The original files are not touched on whatever you do inside the Multitrack session.

So back in the waveform editor or you might be working in the waveform or the Spectral Frequency or the Spectral Pitch Display, all those guys are destructive.

So you need to be aware that you're changing the file.

Here in the Multitrack session it's non-destructive.

It's just kind of layering it on top.

One more place where you could apply effects is the Mixer.

And the Mixer has a little area that says fx.

You can see the button right there, but you can't see what effects are added to it, because of the screen resolution.

We're working on here to keep our fonts looking sharp and large.

So I'm going to expand the view of it by pressing the tilde key as I hover over this panel.

The tilde key is in the upper left corner.

And that focuses only on that one panel.

Now you can see those effects that we applied to that one track.

They show up here in the Mixer as well.

And you can also apply effects within the Mixer the same way.

So I was trying to say they're like six different ways to apply effects.

The Mixer is a location, where the process is basically the same as it would be if you were over on the waveform side of things.

The difference is that you're doing it here within the track.

Well, you can do within the track and the Multitrack session as well.

Let me press the tilde key to pop out of this full-screen view, switch back to the Multitrack session.

And you see a little button here that says fx.

If you click on that the effects show up here in each track looking very much like they do over here.

If I click back this one, which is the default, Inputs/Outputs, you don't see them there, but they are tucked away there if you press on the fx-Button like so.

Okay, I told you I wanted to talk about VST plugins before we leave this tutorial.

VST stands for Virtual Studio Technology, created by a German company.

The German pronunciation would be Steinberg.

Pardon my German there.

We switch over to the Steinberg website.

This is a PlugIn Zone, they call it, inside the Steinberg website.

And they present companies here that create plugins for a fee, where you have to pay for these guys.

But if you were to do a web search on VST plugins, you'll find hundreds of free VST plugins.

And what's really cool about these guys is that all of them will work inside Audition CC.

Audition CC is VST-compatible.

And so these guys have these interfaces that look for all the world like hardware with their intended look like hardware, but in fact these guys run as an interface inside Audition CC.

And then you can control these guys as if they were hardware sliders or things like that.

And many of these plugins will create sounds like they'll be synthesizers or they have really dramatic effects that go way beyond what you find inside Audition CC.

So I really suggest that you go check out VST plugins.

The reason there was a VST and VST 3: VST 3 is the latest plugin technology, the latest Virtual Studio Technology from Steinberg.

So, not many plugins will be VST 3-compatible, but it's good to know that Audition CC is compatible with VST 3 in case you find VST 3 plugins out there, as well as the sort of standard VST plugins.