Have you Ever been to Audio Effectsville? The Pit Falls of Audio Plug-in Effects – Part I

Have you Ever been to Audio Effectsville? The Pit Falls of Audio Plug-in Effects – Part I
These days most people who write and record music use a computer somewhere in their audio recording set up. Some of us, me included, record, edit and master our recordings without actually leaving the digital domain. In the old days, before reliable digital processing was available, everything stayed in the analogue domain; everything was recorded onto a multitrack tape recorder and would then be mixed onto two track tape recorder, which in many cases gave way to the dat machine, before being mastered onto a vinyl master which would then be used to duplicate the music. One might think that all this “progress” had led us to higher quality audio recordings. This has become a hotly debated issue over the last twenty years or so and it seems as if the jury is still out. Personally, I have to concede that if you want to know what quality is then try listening to Steely Dan’s greatest hits as it will give you a few pointers.
The top studio’s all use digital equipment but you can bet your last buck that their “business end” processing will be mostly analogue and most of it you or I will never be able to comfortably afford. So where does that leave us mere mortals? Well the humble plug-in has become a cheap substitute for expensive analogue processing and allows us unprecedented levels of audio manipulation. Naturally these plug-ins need a sequencer such as Cubase or Logic or an audio application such as Sound Forge to be of any use but anyone can, even with a reasonably humble computer, get these applications and plug-ins to run. Also, most audio sequencers also come with an array of plug-in effects built in so you need not to spend much before being able to play around with effects plug-ins.
When you first start to play with audio effect plug-ins, especially if you have no experience of studio or analogue type recording, you will probably be over-awed with the possibilities for manipulating sound. Indeed it seems that whatever type of effect you need there will be some space age plug-in that is available with more parameters than you know what to do with. It is like being a child in a sweet shop, there is too much choice and you want to try everything all at once. You will get sucked in like a fly to the proverbial turd. As your pc grinds to a standstill and you manage to turn off all the plug-in effects all you are left with is the humble sound you started with and after hearing it with phasers and pitch shifters and distortion and delay and reverb and autopanners it suddenly sounds small, uninteresting and useless. When you reach this point, and you might not realize that you have, you have fallen into the audio limbo where you will waste many hours on music that will never see the light of day and even you will not be able to bear to listen to it even years later. You have reached audio Effectsville where nothing is real and everything is out of phase. ...... to be continued

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