Audio FX | Insert vs Send/Return | X32 Effects Setup

[Music] hey welcome back to the channel this is dave with alum house sound and today we're gonna be talking about effects i've had a lot of questions recently about the difference between insert effects or send and return effects and how they really work and and how to best utilize those so maybe you've been practicing on the daw maybe you've been following through the process of learning how to mix using a daw how do you practice at home i'll link that video here that you can check that out after this i'll also put it down in the description with the playlist that you can follow along along there at home but before we dive into the console i want to give a little bit of education around the difference between an insert effect and a send-in return effect and then we'll jump onto the x-32 we'll look at how those things are set up and i'll even wrap up with some tips and tricks for you that might help your mix be a little bit easier to do every week all right so let's dive into these differences of effects so we've got our trusty white board here or white piece of paper and there's two main styles of effects all right first we're going to talk about insert effects and then next we'll talk about what i call send and return effects there's probably some more official name for it but that's what i call them because that's what they do but an insert effect is this you have a signal coming in let's say from an xlr coming into your console and before it goes to your fader over here you have the ability to insert an effect now in the old days i'll show you a picture here the they actually the consoles on the back have something that says ins that's for insert you would use a cable that looks like this which gives you the ability to have a mono signal going out and then a mono signal returning now we use these for much different purposes nowadays but this is what they were designed for you would stick one end in and you would have the tip in the ring and one would send one would return and it would return on that same channel so back here this is returning on the same channel now on most digital consoles what we have the ability for is a compressor a compressor is a mono effect in this case and so we're going to have the mono signal come in it would go to a compressor then it would go to the fader now also many times nowadays we have an eq that's also inserted in our channel strip and then it would go to the fader now you have the ability on these digital consoles especially the x32 that i do a lot of videos on to bring in a different effect let's say it's a a de-esser which is a specific type of compressor for removing s's thus the d esser so if you have somebody that talks with a super heavy s you can use this it's a compressor that's at specific frequencies look up a de-esser they're really helpful and handy maybe you've got a bass guitar or an electric guitar and you need to add some sort of an amp simulation you know something that has some drive to it you could do that with an insert effect and you can then choose where this insert effect goes whether it's here in our case on the x32 you can decide if it's before these other on-board effects the compressor and the eq or you can do it after the compressor and eq side note on our on our channel strip on the uh on the x32 you can also decide which of these happens first the compressor or eq that's not the discussion for today but you've got the ability here to take whatever insert effects you want to do and you can insert them before the compressor and eq or you can do it after so in the scenario with an amp or a drive you might want to do that afterwards because if you push it up here you might be compressing or eq'ing out some of the the sound that you're looking for here however a de-esser typically i run a dsr first because then i am eq'ing after the de-esser i don't want to eq out the s's before i let this insert effect actually work so this is all happening though before we hit up to your fader here that allows you to move up and down and so this also impacts everything that happens in your other chains so if we use a reverb then this whole signal is going to be sent to the reverb if we use a delay all of this stuff is going to be sent to the delay be wise about what you use here because it will hit everything that is downstream from this input all right ascendant return this is where we take a bus of some sort and we group certain instruments let's say it's a drum bus and we want we want our drums to go to a reverb so we would put all of our drums so maybe not kik but snare tom one tom two okay floor tom we take all of these instruments we group them together on a bus and then they get sent out so this is mono over here the bus is mono typically i know you can do a stereo pair of two buses but let's use the example of the way that most of these consoles are set up you have a mono input it's sending out to this reverb and then the reverb is going to return a left and a right channel and i'm going to put the return over here all right so it's returning a left and a right channel now with this we have the benefit of having some faders here okay but these have to return on two channels of your console so it's going to it's going to send out and then it's going to have a stereo return it's very similar to what we looked at over here however you're going to be returning a stereo signal which is going to be coming in uh into two channels in your console this one goes out mono and comes back on the same channel which is mono this one goes out mono and then comes back stereo we're going to look at this in the console in a minute but but this this difference between send and return effects versus insert effects when we were in the analog world this made a lot more sense because we had to physically plug cables in we had to route things out of a bus into sometimes it was into a compressor and then into a reverb or into a reverb maybe into a delay and then a reverb and then back into the console and this just gives you the ability to adjust how much of that reverb comes into your mix also because we deal with live streaming a lot this determines uh if this reverb or effect is going into your house into your live stream one or the other you get to choose but let's dive into the console now and see how all of this stuff is set up in the console alright so up here on the console if we hit the effects tab then it brings up you see four on the left and four on the right different effects effects one through eight this is the home screen you can use the arrows down here to be able to select between the individual effects as you can see the tabs have above there you could also use this bottom right encoder knob and it highlights as you twist it it's going to highlight the effect that you're looking for then if you push it it will automatically jump to that effect that allows you to make those changes it also now becomes a return to home button so we can return back to the effects home so on the left hand side here these are the effects returns these by default are set up as send and return effects you can change that on this console to be an insert effect to have a bunch of insert effects but only these four can be used to send and return these are pre-mapped to your buses 13 14 15 16. again you can change those as well if you would like so let's look at what we've got here bus 13 you would just use these encoders if you wanted to change it you can see that that i can switch this between any buses or go all the way back and make it an insert but again with buses we're preset at bus 13 on this first one and so we would build a mix using sends on fader usually is the easiest thing to do you would build a mix just like a monitor mix just like a live stream mix any auxiliary mix that you've built where you would set levels of each individual input goes into that bus then the bus sends that mix into this effect so for this one we'll just take a look at it this is my vintage reverb i love this reverb it's got a great sound to it so this one is going to be coming in some little things up here you can see left and right are being matched in terms of all of their settings and then you can send it back out and this actually returns on the console we'll get to that in just a second but this is going to return on the console just as a stereo pair with left and right panning well if i if i scroll over here i've got another this is a delay in chamber and i believe that the next ones are just duplicates of that that i use for my house vintage reverb delay and chamber so nothing too exciting right there i'm going to go back to the home screen though and let's go over here to the right and talk about these insert effects these become much more personalized if you will to how you mix and how you use them so this is where this console becomes really powerful these insert effects could be set up as stereo so if i if i uh switch this around you'll see i can get a stereo de-esser which means that i could affect a stereo pair or a dual de-esser okay dual de-esser gives me the ability to have a de-esser for two input channels so as an example i have channel 12 which is my pastor's mic running on on the left side if you will of this effect and then i have a handheld mic which is going to the right side channel 12 channel 13. so if i hit edit now what i've got the ability to see here is i've got pastor mike which is channel 12 and then i have handheld which is channel 13. you can see in this little icon in here these are not linked so i'm going to go back and just change this to the stereo de-esser i'm going to set it and go to the edit button and now you can see that the icon is linking left and right okay go back here change this to dual diesel where it was now you can see that they have kind of a an a channel and a b channel a left side and a right side but it's two mono inputs then down here you have two encoders for this a side two encoders for the b side and you can adjust you can adjust your settings there's a low setting and then we also have a high band setting to pull out you can do some research on what exactly the low and high do but they are preset certain frequency ranges that are naturally resonant that we may we might want to remove all right so if i go back to the home screen here the next thing that we're going to do is you see that there are two insert buttons here that one and that one so once we've made our selections let's look at this next one let's say that we wanted to add add some drive into our bass guitar so i might come back here and do they have stereo tube stage amp i'm going to do dual tube stage amp because my bass guitar is just a mono signal so i'm going to set that now i'm going to come over here and my bass guitar is on channel 7 so i'm going to go all the way back past the busses down to the channels find channel 7 i'm going to push that and then i'll push the insert button so here now channel 7 is set up and inserted in my bass guitar i could then hit the edit button and you'll see that bass is set up on that a side and so all of these controls now are for the a side you can see we've even got a bunch of windows down here a side a side now if i go down one more you'll see it switch from a over to b see that now it says b and so we've got two window pages for b but we can make our changes how much drive you want uh harmonics odd harmonics it's got so many features in here it's really a great tool but the last thing i want to show you now i'm going to select my base channel and i'm going to come over here to the home screen and what we're going to see is we've got a couple features up here since we're looking at the screen all right so right now the signal comes in hits our input meter input gain it goes through the low cut then if we had a gate on there it would go to gate then eq then compressor and then insert you see ins there that's insert we can use this there's a little icon here a little uh encoder that allows us to move it post these or pre these so eq and dynamic being our onboard effects we can do it pre effects on board effects or post these onboard effects do you see how that moves so i can also turn the insert off right here and not insert it so then it would just bypass that tube amp but push it here and then after that again all of these effects because this is an insert effect all of these effects that drive included is going to go out to any of my bus sends any of my other locations that i'm sending the signal so be wise about how you use that and you can feel free to play around with where you like to have that insert effect these are great things to mess with by the way in your daw practicing with multi-track recordings and practicing in a daw will really let you fine tune and refine your process for how you like to mix all right so on the right hand side we talked about send and return effects and my bus 13 was linked to a vintage reverb so i can select that i can hit sends on fader in the middle of the screen here and now i have the ability to use my input channels that i can build a mix this mix will go not to the main output but it's going to just go to this one bus that bus then sends it out to the reverb and then we have to get that signal back into the console on some channels so i'm going to turn sends on fader off and on this third layer over here way down over here when i push that now i have some effects returns right here these are pre-labeled effects left and right for one effects two left and right three left and right four left right because you have four stereo returns and this is where we can determine how much comes back into our mix also if we select this return we can determine where we want this to go so stereo bus is not selected right now if it's orange then it's on and that means that this return would go all the way over to my house mix and my main output but i have it turned off because these two red effects are specific to the stream for me so this is a reverb this is a delay specific to the stream now these are also reverb and delay but you'll see that these are set to go to my house because i i use two for the house two for the stream okay now i'm going to do another video about how you can utilize these auxiliary inputs over here on the far left a lot of times we just use them for pc inputs they actually have some connections on the back of the console that would allow you to utilize some sending of a mix to an auxiliary which would give you an ability to add an outboard effect and then you could bring that back in here through a stereo pair you've got four mono inputs you've got a lot of flexibility you can do with this console for sending and returning for effects but what i'm going to talk about in the next video is how to use a daw to build some effects as an effect rack that's to use live for mixing with front of house but maybe you feel limited by the effects that are in this console and you want some different reverbs different delays or you've built some really nice setups in your daw you can then send them through usb return them through usb right into some of these auxiliary inputs but we'll talk about that in the next video let's wrap up with this one now i always forgot the best practices part so let me load a different scene here go back up to this one all right so this scene is the live stream uh live stream front of house scene that we use at my church and i want to kind of walk through really quickly how this is all set up um there this may this may warrant a whole other uh a whole other video about this scene that i'm using it's very similar to the post fader aux mix uh the the two mixes with one engineer video that i did a while back but here's what i've got so in terms of effects if we go back to effects home effects home like we've talked about i have and you can't see this but i'll just tell you i've got a vintage reverb for my live stream i have a delay in chamber for my live stream then i have a vintage reverb for my room a delay in chamber for my room next i do have the dual de-esser and that is set up uh de-essing my pastor's mic and my handheld mic so that stuff is the same then we we skip i've got a sub-octave thing that i was messing around with we're not using that actually you can see that it's not inserted the next one down though if i push this down here we have a dual ultima compressor this is very similar to an 1176 type emulation which is a great compressor you see that that's on channel 14 and 15. so i'm using that my channel 14 is my male vocal my male lead and then i also have a female lead which is on 15. so if we look at that real quick from a home screen perspective you can see that i'm coming in i'm hitting the onboard eq i'm hitting the onboard compressor then i'm going to another compressor i'm going to that ultimo compressor so this first compressor is a very fast attack very fast release it's knocking down a lot of the quick peaks and then the the ultimo compressor is really adding the character and quality with compression back into that vocal all right back to the effects window back to the effects home the last thing i've got down here a bus 11 and 12 is my live stream and that's my precision limiter that i'm using inserted onto my live stream so think about this my live stream is a bus which is over here bus 11 and 12. so when i hit select and i hit sends on fader now all of this is my live stream mix it's a post fader mix so it starts out based on this front of house mix and then we make some alterations you can see that these kind of have a little ebb and flow to them but they are mostly uh pretty pretty even across the board but these are the alterations that i need for my live stream mix so my live stream is a stereo paired of buses now when i take this remember that this if i hit the home screen this bus is a stereo pair i have onboard effects so i have some eq that i've done for my live stream slight compression that i've done for my live stream then at the very end i've inserted a limiter this is a stereo limiter and i'm using both sides both a and b match and that's for the live stream so if you do any mixing in a daw and you're doing some mastering this is pretty standard mastering you're going to add probably some eq some compression and some limiting to get it up to a broadcast level so if i jump back over here and i hit the effects screen you can see that i do have stereo link turned on this is turned off but this is turned on that means that both sides of this limiter you can see are matching based on the little icon there and they are in fact inserted so there's various ways you can use insert effects they don't have to just be on the input side of things you can do buses with insert effects you also have the ability because you've got a built-in eq and compressor on every aux channel you've got the ability to do some some great refinements over there as well all right i'm going to turn sends on fader off the last thing i'm going to recommend if i come down here to my effects returns you'll see right now this affects to return is a delay and effects four returns delay use your mute groups when your worship leader is talking and you've got a delay on it's really obnoxious so i have a mute group six which is set up just for muting those two effects that mutes it in my live stream and in my house all at the same time with a quick push of a button because i'm never looking at this screen while i'm mixing i'm on my dca's and i'm on my layers over here for my instruments and my inputs so i can quickly just hit this mute group six and know that that's going to mute my delays all right one last bat one last best practice that's really hard to say one last best practice tip i'll give you is using dca's to control your effects so you could set up this dca to be on the effects returns or the effects send for me i typically will take my buses excuse me i'll take my buses here and if i hold down my delay then that is affecting the signal going the amount of signal going into my effect so my mute group is going to mute my return but this is going to determine the volume of the mix that goes into this effect you could though set it up to be on the return side and you could use this dca to effectively control where this fader goes up or down uh with with one dca in your easy mix setup so you see i have reverb and i have delay if i need a little bit more reverb i can push the reverb up the delay i can push the delay up or i can turn it down or i have my quick mute groups over here all right that's it for the tips all right that's the quickest i can make this video about insert and send return effects i hope you found it helpful and valuable if you did make sure to hit the thumbs up button that's going to help other people find this information as well like normal hit the subscribe button and the little notification bell so that you know when these videos come out but listen uh more importantly share this video if you've got somebody else that you know could use this information feel free to send this link to them and help them out as well if you've got questions toss those in the comments below i'm always in the comments section i'm happy to help you out there but i hope this helps you on your mixing journey we'll catch you guys in the next one [Music] peace [Music] you

Channel: AllamHouse

Views: 10,177

Keywords:

Id: ofDMs1ecjdw

Length: 25min 50sec (1550 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 13 2021