Lessons

Lesson Info

Plugins

Ok, so let's talk about plug ins for a little bit. The cool thing about visual consoles is that not only do they have digital channel strips and full recall snapshots, but they have plug ins. You can get plug ins from all kinds of manufacturers that sound really, really cool everything from re verbs and effects too. Compressors, ring modulators, accuse delays, everything you can think of, even guitar processing and modeling there's a lot of stuff you can do on the actual venue consul, whether it's a profile or a c forty eight in this case or any of the venue based avid councils, all the plug ins get registered and installed through the plug ins tab on the options page. So plug ins air specifically manufactured for venue software. So you have to make sure that whatever plugging your installing actually is compatible with the venue software and built for venue, then you comes with a new initial batch of plug ins on dh. Then I believe that there's an upgrade with the profile systems for t...

he venue pack plug ins, which include another set of plug ins. Right now this is just the basic set of targets just to give you an idea, but the way to install plug ins there's sort of two things you have to do for installation you have to first install the actual plug in itself and then the second thing you have to do is authorize it through an I lock. So typically what you'd want to do is put in either. The c forty eight comes with a dvd drive, so a lot of times plug ins will have a dvd that comes with it you can install from or you can actually install them with a usb flash drive. You could install the flash drive into the usb with the installer on it on. But if you had that installed, it would show up under here under council, you have another option for the usb drive and you could pull up the installer. It would show you the list of plug ins on that drive. Then you could install them onto the council. Once it's installed, you have to install the authorization onto an eye lock, which is also plugged into a usb port. And you have to make sure that the authorization is in is is put onto the I lock through the eye lock software from the manufacturers. So the difficult process you go through is you get the registration code by buying it from the manufacturer. You tell the manufacturer your I lock id, they transfer that to your account, you go into the I lock account. And put in your eye lock usb key it shows you you have a pending authorization to your account you download the authorization and install it onto that usb key and then you put the usb key into your you'll consulate s c forty eight and now the authorization is on there and any time you try to bring up that plug in then it will authorize it and allow you to use it. Most of the plug ins come with thirty day trials if you wanted to try it out for thirty days after which they expire and you have to pay for the full version or remove it from the council another thing that's to keep in mind too is that once a the council has been booted up without the plug ins authorized it automatically disables them and in order to re enable them you have to go back to the plug in screen and right click sa go ahead on instar disabled the bomb factory pulling in here so if you came into and it had been disabled you'll see the list of disabled plug ins and you can right click and click enable and it will initialize the plug in racks look for the authorization and then allow you to use it based on whether or not there's a plug in installed that has I lock installed that has that authorization um that's just something to keep in mind authorizing those plug ins and enabling them in the setups page before you actually start using them. Ok, so now let's actually talk about how you use plug ins. You've got them installed, you've got him all set up. You want to start using them the way that the plug in system is set up in the venue software, you basically have four racks that you can use that sort of set up a ziff you had physical racks of outboard gear. What I like to do is name into the racks for specific things. Eso I'll usually use one for drums, one four guitars, and this is obviously typically for rock set up one for vocals, and then I'll use the last one for, um, river bs and then within each of those racks, you can put up to ten plug ins for each rack. Now, keep in mind every time you add a new instance of a plug and it's using mohr of your dsp. So you want to make sure that you're checking your devices page to see how many spot you have available right now, you can see dsp foreign five or a twelve and sixteen percent just from that one instance of river that I have pulled up. So as you add more and more you'll see these start to fill up a some point you'll reach a limit and you'll have to either decide to reduce your input channels your affects returns or your um uh or your plug ins available so once you have all the plug and set up in each of the racks there's sort of three options and keep in mind you want to be in config mode for this to add plug ins because any time you add a plug in it cuts out audio and then authorizes and installs the plug in and then comes back online it takes about you know, four, five seconds but you want to make sure that your config mode for that so the first thing I'm gonna do is select a plug in and that's this little square right here and there's sort of three options I get the ball first woman don't remove this I can either bring up a model plug in so it's just one channel input one channel output there's all kinds of dynamics reeve, herbs, et cetera I can bring up a stereo plug in which means that there's two inputs into outputs eso like a river might have two infants into outputs um or I could bring in other and this is where you could set it up so that you wanna have a monologues and feeding a ste dario river for example on dh these are all one in and two out what that means is that I can send a model signal from any channel to a stereo reverb and still have the stereo panning of the stereo reverb effect so let's go ahead and I'll bring up a mano uh compressor will say we'll use this smack compressor and once it brings it up then I have to decide how I want to patch this into a channel I can either patch it is an insert where it's inserted and then return to the same channel I can patch it as a send from a channel so I can send it from one channel and then patch it out too either effects return or another input channel or group or physical output or I can set it up as a on an effects channel where it's patching from a bus channel coming in from any bus that I feed to it to the plug in and then patching it back to an affection turn so we'll start with the simplest way which is as uncertain so I've selected the plug in I'm going to go up to the top here and select as an insert and I want to send it up to channel one so now channel one is feeding this plug in and if we'll go ahead and play me taking out ofthe q two main federal quick so if you see now I have the main fader urns are I have channel one being fed as an insert to this channel and that's quickly accessible either by just going to channel one and seeing the inserts overhearing clicking on it or I can go to the plug in page itself and see each of the channels and find which one is actually patched on channel one or this is kind of cool if I'm in the plug ins page, whatever channel I select will automatically bring up whatever plug ins are assigned to that so I could be looking at the plug ins page and adjusting those while I'm selecting certain channels and I can bring up channel one, for example, and it'll bring up all the plug ins associated with that channel if I have multiple plug ins like let's say, I also want to bring up a seven q as an insert on that channel then every time I select the channel um it will bring us to the last channel in the chain, so this is on insert level or insert number two so I can switch back and forth between these two and make any sort of adjustments I want with the plug in in line um the only way that I can override this let's say that I wanted to be looking at the kick trump channel while I was suggesting something on channel eight if I switch to channel eight, the plug in disappears so let's say I wanted to be looking at the way the kick drum while I'm also adjusting the base and I don't want to switch off of the base, I can use the push pin, which is up here in the corner, and if I have the push pin on the no matter what channel I select the plug in on that push pin remains pushed basically pen to the screen so that I can continue to keep it up without it continuing to disappear sometimes that's helpful for if you have, like a stereo e q across the master bus parametric you or a master bus compressor and you want to be adjusting that while you're making changes to the mix, you can keep that up in the plug in window and have it pinned down without having to, like, change anything on the council. Um, there's sort of two different views of plug ins. There is the standard view and they switch back and forth with this little button up here in the corner. The standard view is all of the individual racks with many little thumbnails of each of the planes, and then I can either double click on the plug and I want to see to zoom in on just that plug in or I can just switch the plug in our switched to zoom in mode by clicking that in the upper right hand corner so there's sort of a global view and then resumed in view and then finally I can actually pull a plug in presets either factory presets or create my own for certain plug ins to be able to use and that's sometimes really helpful if you want to save some time you can either choose a plug in or you can create your own by just clicking new whenever you have the settings that you want in the naming it what you want um okay, so we've covered sort of using plug ins is inserts using plug ins and sends the next thing that we want to do is talk just quickly about how you use key and put in key sources on plug ins let's say that I wanted to kick drum to be triggered by the bass guitar the kids from compressor s o I have this kick drum for compressor on the kick drum itself I'm going up to key source and I'm going to choose base I don't know if that's actually the base I think it's actually channel ten um but well yeah well child ten um and then decide where the pickoff point is going to be whether it's at the top of the channel pre theater after the incident return and now the kick drum is actually being fed by the kicked from compression is actually be controlled by the base feed that sometimes helpful in certain types of music. You want to drive the kicked from compression of the kick drum gate with the bass guitar, or vice versa. S o that's. How you set up key sources in with plans and yeah, I think that should be it for plug ins. They could be really, really useful a cz long as you keep them organized, I think, is the big thing. We start to mix bigger, bigger sessions, it's also really helpful and big festivals where you have channels. Switching compressors are instruments, switching from inputs. Sometimes you can keep like your base compression settings on a plug in, and then just move the inserts in the new channel whenever it switches to a new channel for next act, there's a lot of ways that you can use plunges to sort of help. Speed up your work flow and get really great sounding mixes.