Embarrassingly a kind of a newbie question, and yes, I’ve watched plenty of videos on this, i.e. Selim’s and I kind of get it. But the truth is that I use FX channels as Group ones. More of an organizing thing than how these affect/improve the use of inserts.
Due to that I have a fairly powerful system, Windows 10 on Ryzen 9 5950X and 64 gb of DRAM and SSD/nVME m.2 drives, computer overload is not an issue (rendering video is far more intensive).
But I do know that putting the same fx on similar instrument tracks can and does muddy things up.
So I’d appreciate a simple explanation on why it is wise to migrate (most of) my inserts onto FX channels in terms of cutting out mud and creating more clarity.
@MattiasNYC - Good point - I have superficially answered my own question. But I want to know a bit more about what happens under-the-hood, so to speak.
Example - and I may have misread/misviewed this: one of Selim’s or another’s video seemed to be able to control the amount of fx through an FX channel without effecting volume output - or maybe I’m confusing this with sidechaining.
Yeah I’m not sure what that refers to. If you have a link to a video I’d watch it.
A couple of fairly typical reasons given for using an FX channel instead of using the inserts on the audio tracks are that you can set the FX send pre-/post-fader and then have different types of control over wet/dry that way, as well as having easier control over overall FX level of for example a reverb.
So having a single reverb plugin on one FX track and using sends to get all your drum tracks to that FX track allows you to adjust how much drum reverb as a whole the mix gets. If you had one reverb per track, i.e. one on snare, one on kick and so on, then you would have to adjust the wet/dry on each one to adjust the total amount of reverb in the mix.
And come to think of it, perhaps that is what the person was referring to: With an FX track the output of the source tracks remains the same and you’re only changing the level of the FX track to adjust (for example) reverb.
I generally use them to have access to fade/blend on an effect, or set of effects, depending on what they are.
They’re very useful for parallel compressions.
I use them to send an instrument slightly to one side and the effect slightly to the other
I have even used them for removing noise from tracks because noise removal plugins are very greedy for CPU. Might sound mad but it works. Check out the pre/post fader options mention already for this as well as the ability to send more or less using the ‘slider’ on the send.
I would just experiment… they can be used to great effect (no pun)