How effective and/or useful are channel strips?

Moldy Burrito

New member
One of the "free" plugins I chose after buying a few was a channel strip. I am curious. What does something like that do the DAW's compressor, EQ, etc. cannot?

This is my very first mix. I am still going through the list of all the features and stuff. :o
 
Some of it depends on the quality of the various plugins...the rest depends on the flavors you prefer for a given situation.
It's not clean and cut...like all/any channels strips VS any/all on-board plugs...you have to compare it on a case-by-case basis, and then select the tool that works/sounds best for that particular moment.
 
Some of it depends on the quality of the various plugins...the rest depends on the flavors you prefer for a given situation.
It's not clean and cut...like all/any channels strips VS any/all on-board plugs...you have to compare it on a case-by-case basis, and then select the tool that works/sounds best for that particular moment.

I see. I toyed around with it a bit, and tweaking knobs and the like just made the sound much worse. Perhaps I need to go back and read about it.
 
One of the "free" plugins I chose after buying a few was a channel strip. I am curious. What does something like that do the DAW's compressor, EQ, etc. cannot?

This is my very first mix. I am still going through the list of all the features and stuff. :o

A channel strip packs several processes into one insert thus saving processing power (ostensibly), as well as freeing up inserts for other uses. For the most part they usually offer some sort of tonal variation as part of the deal.
 
Is there a limit, other than CPU processing? I suppose that might depend on the DAW, but in Vegas Pro there aren't defined slots, you just stack plugins as needed.

Some DAWs have a limited number of inserts per channel. Pro Tools for instance only has 10 "slots" per channel. In general, a channel strip saves on cpu and has slightly less sample delay than using separate eq,compression, etc.
 
Can't you put another bank of ten in? I might be thinking of sends.

10 sends and 10 inserts. Each send can go to an aux channel with more sends and inserts so technically you are not limited to ten but at a certain point the latency gets to be a problem.
 
I have been messing with the channel strip more, and am trying the presets. Just the presets have improved the tracks quite a bit. Now I need to learn the "why" it sounds better. Not finished, but much better.
 
Jesus I just keep finding more and more reasons protools is a joke.

The main good reason I can think of for a channel strip is just having all those controls at one place so you don’t have to keep going back and forth between plugins or clutter your screen with multiple Windows.

The main reason I never use them is that you’re kind of stuck with what they decide to put in there. If you like the EQ, but not the compressor, or worse if you actually like both but don’t like saturation in between them. There are often a lot less parameters on any section than there would be in a dedicated plugin, but those parameters actually are in the code somewhere, just set to whatever the developer thought was right, and if you think it needs to be tweaked a little bit, you can’t. So what? Swap for another channel strip and hope it’s better?

Now in Reaper there are at least a couple of ways to get the convenience of a channel strip by displaying parameters from various plugins in one place. This lets you get under the hood when you get all tweaky, but then have the most important knobs close to hand when you’re in the thick of things. I have set up a couple of chains like this, but I seem to always end up wanting the one parameter I decided wasn’t important enough to put on the strip.
 
I'm not big on them but I do have one I use. To me one of the reasons to use one would be consistency between tracks. If you find that "sound" you like for your bass, acoustic, electronic whatever. Now I know you can just have tracks with saved settings for each and that's what I've always done but now I have the strip on each too that gives me just a bit of different juice than the standard Cubase tools. Which aren't bad.
 
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