10. Effects — the “spice rack”

Effects are added after a sound is made, to change its character or place it in a space:

drive / distortion: push it until it growls and crunches (think electric guitar).
crush (bit-crush): make it lo-fi, gritty, “old video game.”
chorus: smear gentle copies together for a shimmery, wide feel.
delay (echo): repeat the sound fading away — like shouting in a canyon: “hey… hey… hey…”
reverb: the “room.” A tiny reverb = a closet; a big one = singing in a cathedral. It’s the tails and washiness around a sound.
compression: an automatic volume knob that turns loud bits down and quiet bits up, so everything sits together evenly and punchy.

# crunchy, lo-fi, wide, echoey, roomy — all five effects on one lead
inst lead = saw delay 0.3 reverb 0.25 drive 0.4 crush 8 chorus 0.5

steps 16
lead  C4 . E4 . G4 . E4 . C4 . E4 . G4 . C5 .

Real names: saturation/distortion, bit-crushing, chorus, delay, reverb, compression. Delay and reverb are usually shared send effects — many instruments feed into one shared echo/room, like musicians sharing the same concert hall.

✅ Live now — sends: delay and reverb as per-instrument send amounts (0–1), exactly the shared-send idea above — every voice feeds the one shared echo bus and the one shared reverb room. And the buses themselves are now tunable with fx lines: fx delay time 0.3 feedback 0.3 wet 0.5 (or fx delay sync 3 to lock the echo to the tempo) and fx reverb room 0.9 damp 0.2 wet 0.45 set the room size and wash. Omitted keys keep their defaults; fx lines can go anywhere in the file.

✅ Live now — inserts: drive (0–1 saturation), crush (bit-crush, 1–16 bits), and chorus (0–1) are per-voice insert effects baked straight into each instrument — the snippet above is real. Push drive for growl, drop crush low (crush 4) for grit, add chorus for width.

✅ Live now — master compression: fx master compress 0–1 adds the one master compressor over the whole mix (see lesson 15). There’s still no per-instrument compressor — compression here is a master-bus effect by design.

← Index · Next → 11. Stereo & pan