Just learned a cool trick of building an analog or tape delay unit in pro tools where you create a bus and insert a delay unit with no feedback and a decent LPF and modulation, followed by some sort of distortion plugin (such as the sans amp plugin). Next, send the the bus back into itself (just a bit!) to create your “feedback”. Every time it feeds back, the sound degenerates more and more, giving us that character we’ve come to seek out every now and then.
I’m trying to recreate it in Cubase 6, however I can’t seem to get an FX to send to itself, or back to a group, than back to the FX or back to a this, then to a that, then back to the FX to create that [controlled] feedback loop.
Now, we all know how dangerous this feature can be and why Steinberg went through the trouble of putting this feedback prevention system in place, but can’t we make that an option in the preferences panel, which is enabled by default, to disable this feedback prevention system so that the brave adventurous users can route signals back into themselves?
Aside from that, does anyone know of round about way of getting around this system? I absolutely love Cubase and love to keep my entire workflow and production within cubase. I find it’s the only DAW that works without really complaining about some stupid audio interface issue, disowning your external dsp based plugins or magically disappear on you in the middle of working, like some other DAW’s do. However the more I work in Bro Tools, and working with it’s great routing and few other cool things, I feel like taking the mixing process to there and do all the production and editing in Cubase.
Indeed it’s not possible in Cubase by design. Which makes more or less sense.
Using RME hardware including Total Mix I can create such feedback loops with RME’s ‘loopback’ feature. Similar functions might be found in other interfaces too… What do you use?
There have been many requests for this I believe, mine among them. I wish steinberg would grant us this feature which is closer to a real mixer and let us decide about feedback destruction ourselves ! After seeing the protools effects you can create with simple plugs, I seethe with envy !
My main studio at home has an RME Digiface with the total mix, but I don’t think I’ve seen the facility to do that. My other studio which I’m trying to do this on has a Focusrite Saffire LE which I think also doesn’t have that capability in it’s mixer. In the meantime, I just plugged the s/p dif back into itself and will have to probably use that to make this work for now. Just gotta use the auto latency calculator.
I’ve also tried to route audio out of a group into a channel and I don’t seem to be getting any signal for some reason.
Thanks Thinkingcap, I got the track routing to work! I must’ve missed something last night, clearly the benefits of working on stuff late at night. I’ll found the loopback in the digiface manual. I’ll give it a go when i get back home tomorrow as I’m working on the X61 rig with the Saffire LE right now.
An entirely different approach would be to create the feedback loop in the analog world - just plug an audio output back into an input. Since part of the technique you describe is messing with the sound as it passes through the loop, this would let you stick some of those fun but dusty boxes we’ve all got lying around into the signal path.
I hadn’t really considered using controlled feedback in the mixer, but this sound like it could be a lot of fun. I suppose I’d always just defaulted to:
Guitar Feedback = lets rock
Mixer Feedback = the mic level is too high
Guess there is more to the story.
As an aside on feedback. Frank Zappa had a guitar made with a speaker mounted on the guitar. He could adjust the level of the speaker to control his feedback. Hummm, I do have that dusty old solid body over there…