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February 28, 2020

Should You Adjust Send Levels or Aux Faders? What’s the Difference When Sending Your Tracks to Parallel Effects?

 

This past week a reader named Ryan F. emailed me with a question that was too good not to share:

And Ryan’s eagle-eyed observation is absolutely accurate. Sometimes I adjust the levels of my parallel effects with Logic’s Send knobs. Other times with the Auxiliary Channel’s fader.

Is there a difference? Don’t they both achieve the same result?

The goal of a Send is to send our tracks to a parallel effect like a reverb or parallel compressor. We adjust the level of the effect to blend with the original track using either the Send knob or the Auxiliary fader.

For example: drums can sound pretty great in one of Space Designer’s Drum Room presets.

We usually only ever need a *dash* of reverb or delay. So we adjust the level of the Send knob to sit find that perfect reverb level in our mixes.

So why fuss with the Auxiliary Channel’s fader at all? Seems a bit inconsistent.

In my experience, there is a subtle difference between adjusting Send levels and Aux Faders. It may not be obvious, but the difference impacts my mix decisions.

So today let’s explore this subtle, but nuanced difference. Perhaps it just might change the way you approach your parallel effect channels 🙂

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Comments

  1. Stephen Leslie says

    March 24, 2020 at 11:54 pm

    Hi Chris, I just read an interview in Sound On Sound magazine with one of the world’s greatest mix engineers Tony Maserati. In it he says “I often get stuff [from producers] that’s out of whack. An effect return may be at zero but the send at -32.
    That’s completely the wrong way of doing it, both for signal-to-noise and gain structure”. How does this tally with what you discuss in the above video please?
    Thanks

    Reply
    • chris.vandeviver says

      March 25, 2020 at 12:05 am

      Hey Stephen, thanks for your comment! First – far be it for me to disagree with Mr. Maserati. We all have our preferences and beliefs. But I think there are reasons for both structures.

      For example: if you send your drums, guitars, vocals, and synths to the same reverb, you may want varying degrees of reverb for each instrument. Leaving each instrument group’s Send level at 0 and only adjusting the Auxiliary Channel level will not achieve this effect.

      Now you could, of course, create an Auxiliary Channel for each instrument group’s reverb. But that sort of defeats the utility of Sends, Busses and Auxes. One of their functions is to allow us to sum multiple instrument groups to a single effect in parallel.

      In this case, I would adjust on a Send level-by-Send level basis.

      But when I want an effect to receive the full brunt of a signal, I leave the Send level at 0, and adjust the Auxiliary Channel level. An example would be parallel compression.

      Hope this helps!

      Reply

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