Apply effects in a multitrack session

This tutorial is about adding effects to clips and tracks in a Multitrack session.

Now notice that I said 'adding effects', as opposed to 'applying effects'.

Here you add effects as they play back in real time, but don't change the original clip.

This is non-destructive.

Inside the Multitrack session you are doing non-destructive effect editing.

You can apply effects to clips, even though it's not really applying.

There's that darn word popping up again.

Or you can add them to tracks.

Or you can add them to tracks and clips within the track.

So you can add effect to a track that affects all the clips in the track.

Here is only one clip, but you could have multiple clips in a track.

And all those clips will then take on that effect.

Then you can apply effects to individual clips within a track, if you need to work on individual ones within a long line of clips.

So that's the basic process.

Let me to show you one thing - before we go too far into it - that you work on the Effects Rack inside the Multitrack session.

When you apply effects, you do it inside the Effects Rack.

But they're sort of like duplicate Effects Racks in two different places.

So let me add an effect to the Effects Rack here.

I'm going to go add Reverb, Studio Reverb...

I'll just take the defaults on that one.

And there it sits inside the Effects Rack with the Track Effects button down.

If I click on fx here at the top of the Multitrack session, that will change the view of the header of each track, such that it displays the effects that have been added over here in the Effects Rack.

So notice the Studio Reverb effect - right there and right there - that effect has been added to this whole track here with the lead vocal on that track.

So this just duplicates the view of that.

And so I don't really need to have this open, but it's helpful sometimes to go ahead and open it, if you want to just have a quick access to it.

So I'm going to change the view back to the Inputs/Outputs.

One other thing, working inside the Multitrack session is very much the same as working in the Mixer, when it comes to adding effects.

In the Mixer, there's an effects area as well.

And any effect you add here will show up in it.

Now you can't see it here, because of the resolution of our screen here.

But I'll just zoom this up a little bit by pressing the tilde key.

And there is that track effect showing up here in the Mixer for that track number 3.

So just be aware: there are 3 different places that show you the same thing.

And we'll just focus our work here in the Multitrack session view only inside the Editor panel.

Since we're not applying effects directly to clips, there are some limitations as to what effects we can use in the Multitrack session.

If I go to the Favorites menu, none of these favorites are available to use in a Multitrack session, because these guys are all applied directly to a clip.

So none of them are here.

You can't use these presets and effects.

They are presets, you can't use them inside a Multitrack session.

If you go to the Effects side of thing you'll notice that these 3 guys also are not available to be used in a Multitrack session.

These are intended to be applied directly to a clip.

And if you go down a little farther, you look at these individual folders with some effects inside them.

Some effects are grayed out, because they are process effects that cannot play back in real time.

They consume too much processor power to be played back in real time.

So they are grayed out.

But there are some effects that are processor-intensive, but they're not called processor effects.

So if I go to let's say Full Reverb, I'm going to get a message that this is a processor-intensive or a CPU-intensive effect.

Just be aware that real-time playback of this thing might not go very smoothly.

So there's kind of this little dichotomy between things called process effects and things that are processor-intensive, but that still work inside a Multitrack session.

So just be aware of that.

So I'm going to delete that by pressing the Delete key, and delete this one by pressing the Delete key and kind of start from scratch, now that we got that all set up.

Besides the Effects Rack, you'll notice it's a little different than the Effects Rack over in the waveform side.

Just look at the top here and see those two buttons.

If I go to the waveform side of things, the Effects Rack over there does not have those two buttons.

Notice down here it's got two little buttons down at the bottom.

If you go to the multitrack side of things you have more buttons down here in the bottom.

We're not going to worry about these other things called the FX Pre-Fader/Post-Fader or the Pre-render track.

These are sort of higher level stuff that we're going to just not include in these tutorials.

And you can always look them up in the Help file, if you'd like to learn more about them.

So we're going to talk about how we can add effects.

We're going to start by adding an effect to an entire track.

We've only one clip per track here, so the Clip Effects is not so much dramatically different, but I do want to show you how they are different here by working on them one at a time.

So I'm applying an effect to the entire track, this entire lead vocal track.

So I'm going to go get that Reverb again by clicking this little slot fly-out menu.

I'm going to get Reverb and clicking on, let's say, we'll get Studio Reverb... like that.

That's one way to add it.

I'll close this down though.

And notice it's still there.

I'm going to press Delete to get rid of that.

If I go up to the Effects menu and go to Reverb, you can also add it that way.

These guys are active.

They'll put this thing on the Effects Rack, but they won't apply it directly to the clip, as you think it might, if you were to access it via the menu.

Center it, here it is.

Some effects you can adjust the presets as you play them back.

And some effects you can't.

This is one where the presets are not accessible during playback, but the properties are.

So I'm going to play back and make some changes here.

So you can make changes to the property and try it out and see what works for you, but you can't change the presets during that process.

So if I go to, let's say, Vocal Reverb (large) ...

I can do that, but I can't change the presets.

Now notice as I changed the properties from the original settings in the preset, a little asterisk appeared here.

That means that you've now changed them.

You haven't changed the original preset.

It'll always sit there in your hard drive and not be changed - no matter what you do here inside the dialog box.

But the asterisk indicates that you have made some changes to it.

So when you come back you go: "Oh yeah, that wasn't the original preset".

Now what's cool about this is that you can sort of use a preset as a starting point.

And then if you make changes that you like and want to use again with other clips or other projects, you can then save that preset by clicking this little button here.

Click that.

It will save it as a preset.

And this is what I do a lot when I mix the recordings of my choir when we sing in different venues.

I want to make it sound like we all sing in the same venue.

So I will adjust the reverb to have one venue sound like the other in case we need to, you know, take recordings from one place and from another and put them on the same CD.

So you can make presets that way.

And I can just name the preset like I'll name the venue and put that in the preset.

So I can just pop that on when I need to use it.

So that's how presets work.

I'm going to close this guy down.

And the Effects Rack keeps that there.

And if I go back it'll be the exact same setting I left it at before, whether I saved it as a preset or not.

It'll remember what I last did there.

So I close that down now.

So I made this change, I've added this reverb, to the entire track.

If I added 28 more clips there, all those clips would have that same reverb applied to it.

But if I want to apply an effect or add an effect, there's that word "apply, and "add" again, if I want to add an effect to a clip, but not all the clips in a track, I can click on this side and go to the Clip Effects side of things.

There's no effect applied here.

I'll apply another one now.

I'll apply something that's really going to be obvious and awful, just so you can hear.

I'll go Special and Distortion...

Now listen to that while I preview that one and make sure I got the current time indicator in a good place where I can hear it.

There we are.

Let me take a preset that's even worse.

You can't really miss it now.

All the distortions begin to show up there.

So you can apply or add an effect directly to a clip and not the entire track, here inside the clip side of the Effects Rack, as opposed to the track side of the Effects Rack.

Sometimes as you add a lot of effects here it changes the volume level of the output.

Sometimes effects will increase the volume a lot, sometimes they drop them a lot.

So if you look at the input versus the output here, you'll notice that by adding these 2 effects both to the clip and to the track the output actually is less now.

So sometimes you want to use this little output to equalize the input.

This is a way to overcome how effects do change the volume level.

You don't have to do it this way.

You can always adjust the blind level over here as well, but this is kind of a nice little way to do that.

And then there's a thing down here called Mix: Dry and Wet.

When you have, let's say, a whole bunch of effects here, each effect - if you open it up - almost every effect has what's called a Dry and a Wet.

Dry says how much of the original sound comes through versus how much of the effected sound comes through.

And it doesn't have to add up to 100.

It adds up to more than 100%.

Then you typically increase the volume of it.

You make those adjustments individually inside clips, but if you want to adjust that further here for all the effects that you've applied in this side of the rack, you can do it here with Dry and Wet.

So I'm going to go to the Clip Effects side of things and turn off Distortion.

So we just hear the track effect here as it comes through, because the distortion would still play there behind this, because we're affecting the Mix Dry and Wet only for the track effects.

So I'll play it now. - Here's Dry.

And then I could, you know, adjust the slider in between someplace to take all the effects that are here to adjust the Dry and Wet overall mix for all the effects.

Or I could do it individually within each effect.

So that's an overall take on how to add effects to clips and tracks in a Multitrack session.

Just the overarching thing here is that this is a non-destructive way to work with effects in Audition CC.