I’d love to see a simpler way of handling effects and their routes.
I’d like to suggest a series of effect that are stacked - like a quad multiband but rather than a compressor, it could be a multi-effects with the ability to only affect the effect signal without having to use busses.
For example, if I load in this Quad effect, i could add a reverb at the first band. The second would be a delay which would have the option to affect the original or the reverb signal. The third band (lets say distorition) would have options to apply to the dry (original) signal, the reverb, the delay, and so on. Rather than having to buss these signals via the mixer, seems it would be neat and tidy to do it in the insert slots.
Maybe something like this exists in the vast world of VST land.
Anyways, loving Cubase keep up the good work Steinberg.
That’s not exactly how a multiband works. A 4 band multiband comp. will split the signal into 4 frequency bands and compress them separately and each of the 4 bands will not affect the others and each of the 4 bands will only affect a range of the frequency spectrum.
Remember audio processing is linear. Your dry signal feeds into the first plugin, get processed and then move on to next plugin and so on.
So if you want several plugins to receive dry signal only you either send to busses or you duplicate the audio track and process them separately.
I’m not referring to a multi-band compressor. I’m using that language to suggest a multi-band effects rack within Cubase.
If you add a delay to as in insert, it would be nice if there was a sub-insert to add effect to that effect without having to create the bus.
This would mean, distortion would affect only the delay and not the original dry signal.
Yes, I know it is achieved by created a bus and routing the delay to that bus and adding distortion to that signal.
But if there were sub-insert where you could choose what insert to apply it to, that would simplify things.
I suppose my using the phrase “quad seres” sounds like I’m referring to multiband comps and lims. But I’m not, I’m meaning a series of inserts that can be assigned to another insert to avoid having to create the bus and routes.
Well, a multiband means that you are splitting the frequency spectrum into several bands, what you are asking is a way to do parallel processing without using busses. They are not the same thing.
The thing is, if Steinberg implemented what you suggest they would have to do so without messing up the insert slots as they are now, which means they would have to implement it in a way that would take just as long to setup than it would be to just route to a bus.
The audio is being send through the plugin chain in a linear way from the top to the bottom. If you need to do any parallel processing you use a bus.
It would not simplify anything, actually it would do the opposite for the majority of users.
Just create a fx track and send your signal to that track, that is how it is supposed to work and how it has been working since forever and that is how it is working on analogue consoles.
KHS: it doesn’t have to break anything in the current system. They just need to introduce a new plugin that loads other VST fx, and is capable of optionally band splitting. This will also fix a problem in Cubase, where you can’t load multiple FX chains on a track. Everytime I want to do that, I have to route the track to an empty group and load the second FX chain on the group. It’s possible but not the most elegant.
Also, because it’s not the way hardware works doesn’t mean we shouldn’t/ can’t do it in software. If I could cut down the track count from 1 track and 3 bus channels to 1 track with 3 multi-effect chain on the insert, I’d do that in a heartbeat.
But he is not asking about band splitting, but asking about parallel processing.
But in the end, what he is asking cannot be done. Simply because the wet/dry control happens internally in the delay plugin so only way to have the distortion only affecting the wet signal, like he is asking, is to have the delay at 100% wet.