How to use guitar pedals as effects in your DAW

hello everyone today we're going to be looking at how to use guitar pedals as outboard gear using them as external effects which you can record into your dw this can be really handy for blending in organic sounds from analog compression and distortion or having effects which you have immediate hands-on control over meaning you can automate these in real time without having to use a mouse or keyboard you can do this on pretty much any dw that exists right now and with any audio interface given that it has more than one set of outputs today we're going to be using the behringer umc 404 as our audio interface which is really handy because of this mix knob we have in the front panel which blends between the direct inputs of the audio interface and the signal coming from our daw for our effects we have the electro harmonix crayon overdrive as well as the strymon big sky but feel free to use any effects you have lying around some great examples i have used in the past are compressor pedals vibrato chorus pedals analog delays fuzz pedals and you can get some really interesting results from experimenting essentially what we will be doing today is sending audio out of logic pro x into these guitar pedals which will then be recorded back into logic so let's look at how everything is connected we have the umc 404 hooked up to my imac via usb which is going into logic we have outputs one and two connected to my speakers so that we can hear what's going on and output three has been connected to the input of the crayon which then goes into the big sky and out of the bix guy we have two outputs going into channels three and four now on logic we're going to have to route the audio so that everything works correctly so here we have a stereo drum track which i have bounced down from some midi drums and the first thing we're going to do is take this drum track and we're going to create a send to go to a bus now because the overdrive pedal i have hooked up only has one input we're going to set this bus to mono and the next thing we're going to do is set the output to go to the physical output 3 of our audio interface now what we're going to do is we're going to hold option and click here and it's going to send the signal from this track into the bus so now the signal is going to be going out of output 3 into the crayon into the big sky if we hit play and have a listen to these drums you can see that the signal is going into our bus meaning the signal is also traveling into our pedals now this is when the mix knob on the umc 404 is going to come in really handy if we have the mix all the way up we're only going to be hearing what's coming out of our daw and we won't be able to hear what these pedals are doing so i'm going to turn the mix knob halfway so that we hear a blend of logic pro as well as the pedals and this enables us to listen to what's going into the interface with zero latency so now what i'm going to do is play the drum track and halfway through i'm going to engage the crayon and mess around with the knobs and we'll see what that sounds [Music] like great so i'm pretty happy with where that sounds at the moment so what i'm going to do now is record the sound into logic the way we do that is i'm going to create a new audio track with inputs three and four and then all we need to do is just record and this drum track will pass through our pedals and then get recorded onto this track here let's do that [Music] great now i'm going to do the same thing with the big sky but first i'm just going to name this trick crayon and i'm going to duplicate the track because the inputs and outputs are exactly the same and i'm just going to call this track big sky now when you're working with any time-based effects like reverb delay or modulation it's best to keep your mix knob at full weight so that you can blend in the effect later this means you have individual control over your reverb level as well as your dry signal and your dw now something to keep in mind is that we can actually automate these effects in real time as we're recording them so what i'm going to do is mute the crayon track engage the big sky and then what i'm going to do is i've got this magneto algorithm up which simulates a multi-headed tape echo now what i'm going to do is record this into logic but while i'm doing it i'm going to muck around with this decay knob which controls the delay time of the tape echo and let's hear how that sounds [Music] great now as you can hear if we listen to this you can actually hear that the automation is recorded into the audio no pointing and clicking and with how tactile everything is you can really tinker with the sounds in a more organic way so now we have two audio tracks one with distortion and one with delay on it let's turn these both down and then we're going to listen and blend the effects and i'm going to set the mix knob on my umc404 all the way up and let's give this a go [Music] now an issue you might run into while doing this is latency because of the amount of time it takes for audio to pass through all this equipment and get recorded back into logic you might experience some weird phase issues going on so for example if we blend this crayon track to the drums you can hear about here that we're getting this fazey sound now to fix this what you can do is add a sample delay to the original track like so and let's link these two and mess around with these knobs until we can get the signal to sound a bit more in phase let's blend this back in [Music] so you can hear when i disable the sample delay it gets a little bit more phasey [Music] something else we can do is we can actually flip the phase of the track as well and see what that does [Music] now you can hear with both the sample delay and the phase inversion that the signal does sound a little bit better let's bypass both of these and hear how that sounds you really had that of the phasiness coming up [Music] right so i'm going to leave those in and fill in [Music] now you might not want an effect this extreme in your track but it can be really cool for adding in extra effects in certain sections for certain songs another issue you may find yourself running into is impedance mismatch although pedals like the strymon bix guy here do accept line level many guitar pedals like overdrives compressors and fuzz pedals are designed to take a high impedance signal from a guitar not a low impedance signal like the outputs we have here on the umc 404 to correct this you would need a reamp box to match your impedance but as you heard in today's example ended up sounding okay without one so it's not 100 necessary but it is something to keep in mind if you aren't getting the sound you want now although you may find it a lot faster and easier to just use plug-ins having external effects like this can come in really handy for when you need some unique sounds added to your mix producer mick gordon who's famous for doing the doom soundtracks has spoken about how he would run all of his mixes through compressor pedals to get more organic sounding results vance powell has also been seen doing similar things i once saw an example of him using an analog delay pedal on his drum buss and mixing them in to create the sort of when the levee breaks kind of echoey feel well that ends it for today's video thank you all for watching i hope you have a lovely day

Channel: musicplanetnz

Views: 16,657

Keywords:

Id: dNaKUKZEmUU

Length: 9min 4sec (544 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 17 2021