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Best way to blend FX live?
I'm playing guitar for a show this weekend and I've been using AUM as essentially a pedalboard. What I do is have a clean channel with a bunch of FX sends, and then each of those is on a bus to the master, where I have some EQ and compression.
The way I want to do it is be able to change and mix the amount of each effect that is coming through, like right now I want a ton of reverb, a little crunch, a little delay, and the next moment I want filter, fuzz, crunch, more delay, less reverb.
This works okay if I'm just playing around at home and can stop what I'm doing to get everything leveled. The problem I'm running into is that if the totally clean channel has enough volume, as soon as I start adding the FX channels in I clip to high goddamn heaven.
I know I should be working in chain and not in parallel to avoid this, but then I can't really control the blend of FX. Also, I have 6 faders and 6 buttons available on stage, and if I map the wet/dry plus the level of all the effects, I'm out of controls pretty quick. Also, not all the effects I'll be using have a wet/dry or a bypass, so if I lessen the effect in the chain, it cuts the volume for everything downstream. For instance, I have a pedal emulation that has gain, treble, and volume knobs only. I have a tone that I want out of it using a combination of gain and volume, but there's no way for me to effect how much clean signal gets through. Any signal going through it is colored in some way.
The only thing I can think of is basically setting it up as a chain, but somehow the volume fader on the track is just controlling how much of the clean signal is getting pulled into that tracks FX? I think this might be possible by putting a bus send pre-fader, but I'm having issues imagining the signal flow.
I don't know if I'm thinking about this all the wrong way but I would think this HAS to be possible, the Grateful Dead had super complex FX mixes set up in like 1974 without clipping.
Help me, Audio Kenobi, you're my only hope.
Comments
If clipping is the main problem or obstacle, you can try putting a limiter in the last FX slot on your master channel.
So I did put the stock AUM limiter on it, but it's sort of finicky and I can't quite figure out how it works. In general, it just crushes the shit out of any spikes in volume causing basically white noise until the decay stage hits.
Can you or anyone recommend a better limiter out there?
Barricade by Toneboosters is a Compressor and a Limiter or both at the same time. Great app.
WU AU Peak Limiter by Jens Guell is the internal limiter, but made into an AU to be used anywhere
No LIMITS AU Limiter by DDMF
Amazing, thank you. I'll try this for now and see if it helps.
Again, I'm a signal flow n00b but when I set up sends on Ableton, they never seem to clip, even if I'm sending one track fully into a couple of effects at once. I don't know how it manages that but I want that in AUM....
AU3FX Push has a few fx one is a limiter.
Amazing Noises Limiter - Audio Processor, which I’m prettsure was made AU at some point.
Pro L is still great
A limiter on the master is absolutely the wrong way to fix this. As you've seen, the limiter itself will add clipping if pushed too hard. This can be improved with a lookahead, but that will add latency that you don't want playing live. It also sucks the dynamics out of your sound.
The easiest and best solution is to use only FX that have a wet / dry mix set 100% wet on a bus and using a send. But that isn't an option for some of your FX.
There are ways to deal with this, but its going to take more time than I have right now to lay it out clearly if I can. I'll be back later but thought I should say something before you go off trying a bunch of limiters that aren't going to solve the problem.
Thank you for saying this, I had a feeling this wasn't right because I know more or less how to operate a limiter and it was just not the desired effect at all. Dynamics were gone, everything was smooshed, etc.
For what you're saying about wet/dry on a send...if, in your method, the effects will be set to 100% wet, then there shouldn't be an issue. My problem is that the effects that don't have a wet/dry are always 100% "wet".
So, if I understand correctly, I can have one input track with 4 different sends on it, sending to 4 separate tracks with 4 separate effects. Instead of setting the sends to 100% and controlling the volume of each of these tracks, I should leave the volumes alone and just be controlling the amount of send?
So far I've tried 2 methods:
The first was a clean input track, no bus send, just the output set to Bus B. Then I had 6 tracks all receiving from Bus B, applying different effects, and sending their output to Bus C. One channel simply sent Bus B to Bus C with no effect, giving my clean mix. I set all the effects how I wanted them, with wet/dry at 100%, where possible. The last channel, the master, received from Bus C and applied slight EQ and went to the audio out. Then, I controlled the volumes of the different tracks with a MIDI controller. This worked sort of OK, but the output level was a bit unpredictable and could clip.
The second method I tried was a single input track, with Bus G as the output. On that track, I had 6 individual bus sends, A-F. I set the send amount to 100% on each one. Then, I made 6 tracks, each with a different effect. Effects track 1 received from A, effects track 2 received from B, and so on and so forth. All sent to Bus G. Then, Bus G had a slight EQ and went out to the audio out. Somehow, this worked so much less well and clipped into oblivion like, immediately. Also, audio was cutting out and dropping way down occasionally, it was very weird and unpredictable and annoying.
In both cases I tried compression and limiters to fix the issue and it didn't do what I wanted at all.
Whether it's @wim or anyone else, I have 2 questions.
1) Any suggestions? I'm a bit stumped and want this to work.
2) Why would method 1 work so much better than method 2? I didn't see a huge change in CPU usage so I don't think it was that, but I have no idea why it would matter either way.
Yeh, that's going to be a bit unpredictable because of any FX that aren't 100% wet. The dry signal is going to leak through and be doubled up for each one of those.
That's a dry signal multiplier and totally explains the clipping. You get 100% dry signal leakage from every FX that isn't 100% wet on every bus. Then you feed that leakage from one bus to the next ... on top of the leakage you're already getting on that channel. That's a terrible setup! 😉
I'm having a hard time thinking of how to describe a setup for your situation because I just don't understand enough about the actual FX being used and how you're hoping to mix them together.
You might be better off putting all your FX on a single bus. Put a pre-fader send on the clean input channel. Set the output of the clean channel and the FX bus to a master bus. Now at least you have control over the dry level and the fx channel using their faders. Bypass the FX that you don't want at any time. On-screen you do that by sliding the plugin to the left. You can also do it from your foot switch by mapping the midi to AUM's bypass parameter. Bypassing FX frees up much of their processing power, so this is efficient too. A single button can be used to bypass more than one plugin, so you hopefully won't run out of switches.
You can't escape some volume issues as long as you're using a mixture of FX that have wet/dry controls and those that don't. But at least you have only two faders to worry about. One if you don't mix in the clean channel.
That's the best I can offer without a lot more detail about what you're trying to do.
OK wim, I haven’t read your comment yet but I want to quickly post and say I figured it out, I’m excited to read and see if we came to the same conclusion.
Ok so you were thinking along the right track but of course didn’t have all the details on what I was running and what I hoped to do, here’s what I did and it worked flawlessly.
First, I have my input channel:
Then I have my effects channels, all set up in the same way:
Then I have two channels receiving the “clean” and “wet” signals respectively:
And those go into the final channel:
Then, I kept my sliders mapped to the volume of the tracks, but then also mapped them in reverse to the C (“clean”) Bus pre-fader send. That way, I decrease the track volume, the C Bus send is increased the same proportion, so the clean signal is going to the clean bus, while the post-fader effected signal goes to the wet bus, which is B Bus here.
Then, I maxed out the clean sends on each track and brought the track receiving the whole clean bus to a volume where it would just touch -0db with the loudest possible playing. Then, I maxed out the fx tracks volumes, which automatically reduced the clean sends to zero, and reduced the volume on the track receiving the whole wet bus until it didn’t clip. I don’t touch those volumes ever again lol.
Then I just summed them to that final track and did the same, reduce volume until it doesn’t clip no matter what.
I have to say, this works absolutely perfectly. The output level is constant, outside of intentional dynamics changes, and each effect blends smoothly with the clean signal in a really nice way, and allows me to set some of the crazier verbs and stuff to wild settings, fully wet, and still have a central anchored tone coming through. Also, it’s really easy and intuitive to work on the faders, and I can blend different amounts of the different effects seamlessly.
I would like to sit down and tweak some individual offsets, since not all the fx channels come in as hot as others, for instance distortion with big gain is super loud, so because the overall volume is capped, it doesn’t blend as nice at full send as say, a delay and a reverb. Small changes would definitely make this sound even better, but I don’t have time before the gig so, a project for later.
Cool! So glad you figured it out! 😎
Me too! I think it would be really helpful to have as a template for jamming electronic as well, either with hardware or in iOS, since you can quickly blend and audition a bunch of different effects without having to map the wet dry or open the window. Just last night when I was playing around I found a really nice combination that I then isolated and dialed in on a single send channel and it was really fun and quick to do it. I know this isn't really that difficult of an issue to solve, as I'm essentially just doing simple routing and gain staging to build a dry/wet control into anything, but still I feel very fulfilled and relieved having solved it lol.
Another use case that I found fun while jamming this morning is using this technique to send things to multiple instances of Gauss at different tape speeds with different sequencing in varying amounts, I can play the fader a little bit and send different amounts as the sequence plays to get a really nice layering effect.