It’s great if the music is great. Nothing can replace a great song. But that doesn’t mean we can’t dress it up a bit to put on those finishing touches. In this article, I’m going to discuss various effects and using them, if you’ll pardon the pun, effectively. Okay, that was just bad. Anyway, here goes.
There are many ways to use effects and many purposes to fill. The key to using effects effectively is to first know what it is you’re trying to accomplish. Is it to create a certain musical ambiance or is it maybe to add some artificial color to a song? Maybe you literally want to transform the instruments into something else. Without a clear plan of what you want the finished product to sound like, you can’t possibly go about choosing the right effect for your song. So let’s go through a few examples. Please understand that this is by no means an exhaustive list as there are many things that can be done to a song as far as effects go.
Let’s start with ambiance as this is the easiest to achieve. We’re going to assume that all instruments are recorded dry, meaning no effects of any kind built into the sound itself. With synthesizers, this isn’t always true. Some factory patches for a number of synthesizers are programmed with an effects section. Using these kinds of sounds does complicate things slightly, but the principles are still the same.
So we have our dry instruments. Let’s say, for the purpose of this example, piano, bass, drums, sax and organ. Let’s say we’re recording a jazz tune using all internal VSTs, meaning no external microphones, so if we want to simulate the sound of a jazz club, we have to add our effects afterwards. The question is, what effects do we add?
In the old days, this was a tall order. Reverb units didn’t have settings. You had to fiddle with the knobs until you “heard” the sound that you wanted to get out of your recording. Today, internal built in effects have presets that pretty much cover any scenario you could want to duplicate, including the ambiance of a jazz club. So all you need to do is pull up your reverb unit and set it to club or room and you’re done.
But is that going to give you the best sound or the sound you want? If you apply this setting to the entire ensemble equally, you’re not going to get a true recreation of a club ambiance. The reason is because the various instruments all produce different amounts of reverb based on the type of instrument it is and how it’s being played. A screaming saxophone is going to produce more reverberation than a softly played drum set. So in assigning reverb to each instrument, you’re going to want to adjust the decay and amount individually. That means, instead of pulling up one reverb unit for all five instruments, you need to pull up one for each instrument, or five different reverb units.
Overkill? Maybe. It depends on the arrangement and the song itself. Some songs are simple enough that one or two reverb units will be enough. In many jazz type songs, the sax is the only thing that needs a little extra reverb if you want the sax to be further back in the mix OR less reverb if you want it to be up front. This is something common with violin concertos. The violin is mic’d so that it goes over the top of the rest of the orchestra in order to be heard. A close mic is going to mean less reverb on the violin. Well, it’s the same thing with the sax. If you want that sax dry and up front, you use less reverb.
Point is, you have to look at the instruments you’re using, the arrangement of the song, and what you want for each instrument as far as how it comes across in the mix. That same quintet is going to sound completely different played in a large auditorium or concert hall. In those cases, one reverb unit will probably do the trick.
That’s ambiance in a nutshell, though the subject itself can get incredibly complex. But what about other types of effects?
One of my favorites is the lead synth that goes echoing across the soundscape. This can be accomplished either by using lots of reverb or delay or both. Reverb kind of washes the sound out and makes it harder to cut through the mix. With delay, you can get that echoing sound and still have the lead synth cut through the mix.
What about when you want the snare of a drum kit to kind of stand out from the rest of the drums? Well, one trick is to record the drums dry, duplicate the track and then isolate the snare from the rest of the kit on the duplicated track, removing it from the original track and then adding whatever processing you want to it. What kind of processing? One thing you could do is maybe add a bit of flange to it. Of course you can always add a little reverb or delay to the snare as well. Chorus also works nicely for some interesting effects.
If you want to get that Beatles “Lady Madonna” like sound, you can try putting some chorus on a regular piano and compressing the heck out of it. It won’t be exact, but it’ll be pretty close.
Probably the key to all of this is to understand what each effect does to an instrument. The best way to do this is by trial and error. With experimental music, nothing is written in stone so there’s no reason why you can’t assign effects to instruments that you normally wouldn’t have. You would be surprised at what interesting things you can come up with. And if something doesn’t work, so what? Scrap it and try something else.
Don’t be afraid to experiment. Some of the greatest achievements in music came because somebody took a chance.
For The Love Of Music,
Steven “Wags” Wagenheim