Audition Reverb

[Amar Khan]

Hi All,

I am fairly new to Audition, however I have been able to edit audio in post - which has been working great! My question to all is, how do I go about setting up audition with effects etc applied prior to recording?

In essence I would like to record audio into the mic but hear myself in the headphones with reverb etc already applied, and recorded?????

I hope this makes sense. Hopefully somebody can direct me to a online tutorial etc, any help would be much appreciated.

Thank you!

[SteveG_AudioMasters_ · Accepted solution]

It makes sense as a question - but also it doesn't make sense, and that's the over-riding consideration with all audio recording...

Audio rule one: Always record dry.

Basically this is because of Sod's Law. This states that whatever effect you add to a recording is the first one you want to change. And guess what? You can't, because your effect is printed into the original recording. Yes, we realise about people wanting to hear effects in headphones whilst they are recording, and that's why Audition has a monitoring ability which lets you feed a track that you've applied effects to, back to a performer - assuming that is that you have a sound device capable of doing this, and don't mind the inevitable latency. Most performers can't stand the latency (delay), so the usual answer is to feed them back the 'wet' signal and not the dry, as it's the delay in hearing themselves that offends. It's down to processing time in your computer, and whilst you can get it pretty short on a fast machine, you can't eliminate it entirely.

But, the track that gets recorded is the signal input direct from the mic (or guitar sometimes) to the track, not the processed one. If you record a track, and play it back immediately in the same channel without altering anything, it will still have the same effects on - but if you remove them during playback, you'll be just left with the dry signal.

And this, my friend, is industry standard practice. Any software that lets you record with effects isn't doing you any favours at all, but I don't think there's much (any?) that does.

There is only one way around this (and it still leaves you with an original dry track) and that is to feed the monitor output with effects back to a spare input channel (if you have one) and record it like that. Not pretty, but if for some unfathomable reason you're desperate to do this, it does work.

[Amar Khan]

Thanks for the reply!

So out of curiosity when somebody is performing live, but they manage to have a reverb effect whilst reading - how is this achievable?  Is this down to the multiple mic setup they have pointed at them?

[SteveG_AudioMasters_]

There are loads of ways to do this. If you have effects in a chain, you can always record the dry and listen to the wet (see below). Also it's quite possible to have a completely different chain fed from the same mic, but going to a completely separate place. This is what happens with most larger bands these days - they have a separate monitor mix just for the performers, and that can have whatever effects they like on it - but it's not what will be fed to the audience, by any means.

You can do this with Audition as well. If you set up a recording channel so that it has reverb on it, and set that to wet only, then just the reverb will be sent to the output - but you'll be recording the dry signal that's going in, even though you won't hear it in the output from the track that's being fed back. This often works quite well with vocalists, because the latency then isn't noticeable.

But as I said, the important thing in all of this is to have the dry signal available, so you can make a sensible choice of effects in a calm manner afterwards, rather than uncontrollably during the recording - this makes much more sense!