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Tutorial 4: Mixing and effects
6. Holding down [Shift] while moving the EQ point up or
down changes the quality (Q) of the EQ. Many people re-
fer to this as the width of the EQ. The “EQ Band Q” set-
ting at the bottom of the EQ window gives you the value of
the quality.
7. You can bypass the EQs by clicking on the “Bypass
Equalizers” button. If you [Alt]/[Option]-click, you can reset
the EQ. A dialog window will open to confirm if you are sure
you want to reset the EQs. If you are sure, click “Yes”.
Experiment with the EQs on all your tracks in this tutorial.
A good tip when using EQ is that it’s usually better to take
away EQ (lower the gain) than to add it.
Now let’s move on to effects.
Audio effects
Now let’s start using some effects. We can add effects by
inserting the effect directly on a track or we can create an
FX channel and use the auxiliary sends of each track to
send to that FX channel.
Insert effects
1. Make sure the Mixer is open.
You can open the Mixer from the Devices menu or by pressing [F3].
2. Begin playback and loop or cycle a section of music
so that you can hear everything.
The tutorial project has its locators and cycle already set for this. Feel
free to change this if you like.
3. Click on the “Edit Audio Channels Settings” button on
the Bass track to open the VST Audio Channel Settings
window.
4. Let’s add compression to the Bass track to smooth it
out. Click on the “Select Insert Type 1” slot and choose
“VSTDynamics” from the Dynamics submenu.
5. Make changes to the settings in the Compressor sec-
tion. At the end of this section, you can load the next tuto-
rial that will contain all of the changes we have made.
!!!
We’ve made a whole bunch of EQ changes to this
tutorial. Listen and see the changes by loading the
project “Mixing 5” found in the “Tutorial 4” folder.
!!!
Load the project called “Mixing 6” found in the “Tuto-
rial 4” folder.
“EQ Band Q” amount
Moving the EQ up or down while
holding down [Shift] changes the Q.