We saw on the analog mixing board that we could take an external effect like an EQ or Compressor and put it right inside the mixing board, inside the signal flow using that funny insert cable which gave us kind of an out and back routing from the mixing board. That's kind of complex to do in the analog domain on one of those analog mixing boards. But adding an insert effect is quite easy in a DAW. It's one of the important things we're going to do. And you're going to find that you can add many, many effects to each track. In a way, the ease of it is kind of a problem in that we tend to add way too many effects in the digital domain, in a, in the DAW. But it still is an important feature that we have. Now, you'll see at the top of the channel strip in the DAW a set of insert points, places that you can add effects. And like Soft Sense, you can buy third-party effects to have very high-quality audio or DSP processing built into each track. It's very common to use your dynamic and filter effects as inserts in a track, and it's important to remember that the insert effects process one by one from top to bottom in that we would call it serial processing. So if you put an EQ first in the top point and then insert, the EQ would process that sound and then it would go to the next one. Maybe you have a compressor there and it continues down the channel strip. So it's very common to use those type effects as inserts in a track. You can apply delay effects in, as an insert in a track but its also very common to add the delay effects like reverbs and delays into an AUX track in a send structure which we'll talk about here. The reason we're bringing this up is, again, one of the main reasons we make these sub-mixes, which is the next topic, is going to be so we can process a group of tracks all at once. While we're working on the DAW, the processing power is always a concern. We saw this when we were setting up the project in the beginning and setting our buffer size. We know that the higher the buffer size, the more plug-ins we can use, but we'd rather not raise up that buffer size. So to be efficient with our DAW, it's nice to use as few effects as possible. And very often you'll want to make a collection of tracks have the same exact processing. So collecting them all into a sub-mix and putting a single effect on one of those helps us with those CPU usage issues. So as you're working with your DAW, always be aware of resources and know that DSP, digital signal processing, is computationally expensive, we want to use as few as possible. As we move into the DAW, I think you'll find that working with inserts is pretty straightforward. But there are a couple tasks I want to make sure that you know how to do. The first one is adding an insert into a track. And in this example, I'll add an equalizer into the track. Once you have a plugin in a track, you have to know how to do a couple things to it. The first is going to be to bypass it. Very often, you'll want to mute that effect, which turns it off but allows the, the sound to go through, and bring it back. Usually, you can do that with some sort of modifier key, which can be very helpful to be able to audition a sound with and without a plugin on. The other thing you're going to need to know how to do, is to choose a preset from that plugin. Very often it'll be a large number of preset settings for the plugin to work in a variety of context and for a variety of needs. So learn how to choose different presets. Then, make sure that you can save custom settings, and bring them up later in other programs. You might find yourself creating a really perfect EQ compression setting and you want to bring that up in other projects. And that can be very useful and you want to get in the habit of saving those presets. It's important to become, sort of modular with your producing. So that as you're creating things, like presets, you can reuse that in other projects. You're going to need to know how to add a second plugin. When you have two plugins it does make a difference which order they're in. As we said earlier, the sound enters the top of the the channel strip, gets processed by the first plugin, then moves down to the next one and so forth. When you have plugins in a track or have inserts in a track, it can be useful to change their order, so you need to know how to move plugins up and down within a channel. This will often involve some sort of modifier key, like Ctrl, Shift, Option, or Cmd, and dragging it down to another location. It's also important to know how to copy a plugin. Again, another key command can help with that, maybe Option dragging will allow you to copy within the same track and also figure out how you can copy between tracks. One thing to be aware of is that if you do have a MIDI track, you will not be able to put the same plugins there. Remember, you can't process MIDI data the same way you can process audio data. So in some programs, there are no plugins in MIDI tracks. And in other plu, programs, there are plugins, but they're specifically designed to manipulate MIDI data, and not digital audio. So I'd like you to take a moment to go to your DAW and just make sure you can complete all those tasks. Adding inserts, bypassing inserts, choosing presets, saving presets, changing the order of inserts, copying and pasting inserts on the same track and between tracks.
