Posted by sam on September 15, 1998 at 02:00:16:
In Reply to: QS effect unit basics posted by Markus Nentwig on September 04, 1998 at 20:42:51:
Well no one else said it already, so I'll say,
Right On Markus! Lots of good tips in there.
The tip about listening to a single sound full wet is right on, if someone practices with the manual in front of them, just using the mix points in the diagrams to route the sound from one module to another they will be an expert in this before long.
I'll add a few things. Each FX send is a MONO send, so the pan positions of voices going to the FX unit don't matter. If you send a stereo patch to FX one (one voice panned full left and the other full right), they are summed to mono on the FX bus input. And then the FX unit puts the sound on the L & R outputs; many of the FX are stereo FX, so like a mono piano through reverb has a stereo image.
Markus also says something like a full wet reverb doesn't sound good, but there's an important point here: Tune the reverb or other FX until they do sound good! A reverb sounds tinny if it bounces around a lot of high frequencies, so filter them out in the reverb or kill some of the high frequency sustain. If you make your FX sound good pure wet, they will probably sound better when mixed with the dry signal, and if you don't, the FX unit can really mess up your sound. You've got to tune your choruses, reverbs, distortions etc just as much as you do everything else in your sound.
I'll also note that some reverb algorigthms sound better than others. I find the room and plate algorithms more pleasing than the others.