Know your GUI
While the walkthroughs elsewhere focus primarily on tone shaping treatments, once you begin searching for them, plugins dedicated to Pan, EQ, Reverb, Distortion and countless other parameters are awash with GUIs aimed at providing visual support for the sounds they produce. This becomes particularly important as, when used in isolation with preset settings, the parameters within plugin effects can often sound rather too extreme.
For instance, if you manufactured a tremolo plugin designed to produce creative panning effects, you would ensure that most of your presets push sounds from the far left to the far right so that they showcase the plugin’s potential fully.
Equally, distortion plugins often produce deliberately enormous treatments that fill bass, mid-range and treble with saturated, overwhelming sounds requiring an EQ after them to tame their wilder frequencies. While plugin manufacturers can’t be blamed for attracting us with their effects this way, if every element of your mix uses treatments with such extreme settings, it will prove hard to balance, as every element will be ‘inflated’.
Aside from the originality from which your mixes will benefit, if you construct your own effects treatments, this is one of the main reasons we always recommend you avoid presets wherever possible. Or at least edit the preset starting points you like, to bring them to a more appropriate treatment for your sounds. GUIs will assist here, particularly in the form of helping you identify the parameters that may lead to too extreme an effect solution.
Use them to check stereo width, the results of filter treatments, length of reverb tails or the amount of gain reduction within a compression setting. Compare what you hear to what you see to find the very bestsounding results.
1 Volume reference
The relative volume difference between the compressed and uncompressed signals is easy to see at a glance
2 Frequency boost
Notice from the bottom of this line the centre frequency of this loud area in our treated sound. Now identified, it can be modified
3 Pan indicator
The display shows just how wide and extreme this pan treatment is. Reign things in with the Width dial