Sending Effects To Effects

How often do you ‘link’ your effects treatments so one effect is triggered by another? Doing this can add unpredictability and depth to your mixes We’ve got a down-tempo groove playing, made up from a number of sampled sources. It’s the rim-shot sound on beat 2 we’re looking to process, taking the opportunity provided by it only playing a single hit per bar to fill in the space between hits. Here’s the groove without any processing. After the H-Delay, we place a filter effect from the UAD Moog Filter plug-in, using a preset called Stereo Motion as a foundation. This rotates the cutoff point of the filter so that it’s low on the left while being high on the right, via LFO movement. Next we set up a first reverb solution for the rim sample using FabFilter’s Pro-R Reverb. We choose a long decay time alongside a dark overall character. The Pro-R lets you clock pre-delay time to tempo, so we select an 1/8th note here. We send this second auxiliary to a third one. We add the Valhalla Shimmer plug-in to produce a super high, ultra-wide reverb treatment which contains some pitchshifting to create a slightly ghostly, unreal treatment. We can vary the volume of all of these auxiliary treatments simply by balancing the Mixer’s faders. This reverb sounds a little predictable after a while, so we set up an auxiliary send from the Pro-R’s auxiliary channel, so that the reverb can be further processed by another effect. We set up Waves’ H-Delay, with a ping-pong treatment, to bounce smeared delay taps across the stereo field. However, the whole effects layer is now dense and predictable. We automate the sends from one auxiliary to the next so that the balance of each hit is always different. Lastly, we place a sidechained FabFilter Pro-C 2 compressor at the end of each auxiliary channel strip and sidechain these from the kick drum.