If you’re using a POD Studio™ recording interface from Line 6 you won’t have to choose one approach or the other because the included POD Farm 2 software operates both ways. The fact that effects can be applied to an already-recorded track doesn’t mean that you’ll always want to record tracks dry (without effects). make the chorus sound different than the verse) and those changes will be remembered by the DAW and executed every time the track plays back. That means that you can change settings over the course of a song (e.g. And effects applied in software are automatable in most DAWs (including Record).
This approach also allows your effects to be stored as presets so they sound exactly the same every time (unlike hardware devices with rotary knobs). Instead, a track can be recorded “dry” and effects can be applied after the fact within the DAW software, keeping the track and its effects independently controllable. These days, home recordists are no longer locked into recording effects as part of their tracks. If it later seemed that the effect wasn’t quite right you had to either live with it or re-record the performance. For guitars, for example, a combination of amp settings, pedals and mic placement was used to get the desired sound in the studio, and the engineer’s job was to capture that sound. Whether subtle and tasteful or wild and in-your-face, effects give character to instruments and, in the case of spatial effects such as reverb or chorus, change their perceived location (close or distant) in the overall sound field of the mix.īefore the advent of modern DAWs, effects other than reverb/echo and compression were typically applied to instruments during recording. guitar) or the entire combination of instruments that goes into a finished mix. We’ll once again use Record as our example DAW, with Line 6 POD Farm™ 2 serving as the source of the effects.Įffects are used to alter the sound of either an individual instrument (e.g. This time we’ll look at a couple tasks we didn’t get to before, specifically applying effects and using automation. In our previous article on DAW Software we defined the core tasks of a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) and used Propellerhead® Record® software to show how some of those tasks are handled.
Make sure to read the other parts in the series (Part 1: the Computer, Part 2: Choosing Microphones and Part 3: DAW Software) for valuable information that will make your recordings better than ever.
In the last article of our Home Recording series, effects and automation - and the freedom they deliver - are explored in detail.