6.0

132
Audio effects
About this chapter
Cubase comes with a number of effect plug-ins included.
This chapter contains general details about how to assign,
use and organize effect plug-ins. The effects and their pa-
rameters are described in the separate PDF document
“Plug-in Reference”.
Overview
Audio effects can be used in Cubase as follows:
• As insert effects.
An insert effect is inserted into the signal chain of an audio channel, which
means that the whole channel signal passes through the effect. This makes
inserts suitable for effects for which you do not need to mix dry and wet
sound, e.
g. distortion, filters or other effects that change the tonal or dy-
namic characteristics of the sound. In Cubase Elements, you can have up
to eight different insert effects per channel (and the same is true for output
busses – for recording with “master effects”). In Cubase AI and Cubase
LE, four insert effects per channel are available.
• As send effects.
Each audio channel has eight sends in Cubase Elements and four sends
in Cubase AI and Cubase LE, each of which can be freely routed to an
effect (or to a chain of effects). Send effects are practical for two rea
-
sons: you can control the balance between the dry (direct) and wet (pro-
cessed) sound individually for each channel using the sends, and several
different audio channels can use the same send effect. In Cubase, send
effects are handled by means of FX channel tracks.
About VST 3
The VST 3 plug-in standard offers many improvements
over the previous VST 2 standard and yet retains full
backwards compatibility.
In the program, effects compatible with previous VST ver-
sions will be easily recognized:
Smart plug-in processing
The VST3 standard features “smart” plug-in processing,
i. e., processing by a plug-in can be disengaged if there is
no signal present. This can greatly reduce the CPU load,
thus allowing for more effects to be used.
This is achieved by activating the “Suspend VST3 plug-in
processing when no audio signals are received” option in
the Preferences dialog (VST–Plug-ins page).
When this is activated, VST 3 plug-ins will not consume
CPU power on silent passages, i.
e. when no audio data
runs through them.
However, be aware that this can lead to a situation where
you added more plug-ins on “transport stop” than the sys-
tem can handle on playback. Therefore, you should always
find the passage with the largest number of events playing
simultaneously to make sure that your system offers the
required performance.
Ö Activating this option can increase your system perfor-
mance a lot in certain projects, but it also makes it more
unpredictable whether the project can play back fine on
any timecode position of the project.
About plug-in delay compensation
A plug-in effect may have some inherent delay or latency.
This means that it takes a brief time for the plug-in to pro-
cess the audio fed into it – as a result, the output audio
will be slightly delayed. This especially applies to dynam
-
ics processors featuring “look-ahead” functionality.
Cubase provides full plug-in delay compensation through-
out the entire audio path. All plug-in delays are compen-
sated for, maintaining the sync and timing of all audio
channels.
Normally, you do not have to make any settings for this.
However, VST3 dynamics plug-ins with look-ahead func
-
tionality have a “Live” button, allowing you to disengage
the look-ahead to minimize latency, if they are to be used
during realtime recording (see the separate PDF docu
-
ment “Plug-in Reference”).
You can also constrain the delay compensation, which is
useful to avoid latency when recording audio or playing a
VST instrument in real time, see
“Constrain Delay Com-
pensation” on page 154.
!
This chapter describes audio effects, i. e. effects that
are used to process audio, group, VST instrument,
and ReWire (not in Cubase LE) channels.
An effect compatible
with a previous VST
version
A VST 3 effect