Plug-in order. Any hard and fast rules?

cfg

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It seems possible that the order in which plug-ins are installed could affect the sound. If one were using several, like compression, reverb, saturation, eq, etc., are there any absolute no-no's with respect to order? What kind of logic should one be applying as they start to refine their raw track(s) by the application of plug-ins?
 
When you say installed I am guessing you mean the order in which you add them to the FX send.
I am sure there will be those who will say you have to do it a certain way and it is the only way. Experiment, see what works, what doesn't. It will also depend on the outcome your wanting to achieve, and in some cases what it is your processing. I am not familiar with saturation, but for the remainder I would usually go: EQ > Compression > Rev
 
No.

If you know what the effects do and what you're trying to achieve, it becomes fairly obvious. If you don't know what they do, you can try things until you get what you want or maybe ask a specific question about a specific situation and maybe get some reasonable advice. If you don't actually know what you want, you can try things until you find something you like, but it'll be tough for anybody to give useful advice.

Anybody who tries to tell you a rule is wrong from the start.
 
For a guitar or bass, yes--the order of effects has a lot to do with what comes out. In a DAW, I've never noticed a difference.
 
No rules. Only logic as to what the goal is.

You wouldn't insert a reverb on say a snare before a compressor. Unless you wer trying to come up with some strange something...

Basic would be as Cranky stated. EQ > Compression > Rev. But then there are sends and who knows what that can be done.

ashcat is right. There are no rules. But there are incorrect ways of going about things.
 
Any hard and fast rules?
Think it through.

Adding delay to a reverb signal *most of the time* makes no sense. Adding reverb to a delay return is as normal as the light turning on when you open the fridge (side-note: It drives me nuts to this day when I hear a delay return that doesn't have the same verb as the vocal on it). Putting a reverb send pre-fade will do bizarre things when adjusting volume. Some of those things might be amazing. Some might screw everything up. There's a huge difference distorting a flange return over flanging a distortion return.

The "obvious" things are obvious -- Generally speaking, you want your insert effects to be corrective before shaping and your additive effects to be modulative before spatial -- spectral before dynamic before additive modulative before additive spatial. That's 95% of your everyday common sense stuff. But there are certainly exceptions. There are plenty of times I wanted something to get closer or farther away so the verb send was set at "normal" level and *pre* fade. When the fader goes down, the verb stays the same. I can think of plenty of times where I wanted a delay send before compressing the snot out of a vocal or guitar solo. There are times where I wanted a vocal *verb* to be normal while the source sounded like it was coming through a radio (verb send before radical EQ curve).

Endless options. Every one of them different than the other. Certainly some "rules of thumb" - but certainly few solid rules.
 
As what everyone else has said, EXPERIMENT. and don't forget, you can also use more than one of the same plug-in if needed. I know some people use more than one compressor on tracks to get the desired effect they are shooting for.
 
Thanks for all the replies.


Think it through.

Adding delay to a reverb signal *most of the time* makes no sense. Adding reverb to a delay return is as normal as the light turning on when you open the fridge (side-note: It drives me nuts to this day when I hear a delay return that doesn't have the same verb as the vocal on it)...

I am not quite clear on this. Are you saying it bothers you to hear two different kinds of reverb in a single track?
 
Yup. What everyone else said. Just remember that whatever you do first affects what comes after... so for instance you'd probably want to EQ before Compression so that the compressor is only working on the frequencies you want it to work on... if you're going to cut out a bunch of low end in the source, you wouldn't want your compressor to be clamping down on low end that you plan on removing. Also don't be afraid to EQ before and after to get the desired sound.
 
Thanks for all the replies.




I am not quite clear on this. Are you saying it bothers you to hear two different kinds of reverb in a single track?

No - I'm just saying that you need to think through the signal. You wouldn't want to add delay (echo) to a reverb return. You'd almost always add reverb to a delay return. (just as an example)
 
For a guitar or bass, yes--the order of effects has a lot to do with what comes out. In a DAW, I've never noticed a difference.

It makes a huge difference in a DAW too.

Try to think of your FX bus as like a physical patch bay - what each effect "sees" is what comes into it from the effexct before it. So, to use a really obvious example, if you have a limiter and a reverb on a track, if you run the limiter first and the reverb second, then the reverb "sees" a track with hard-limited peaks, and puts reverb to that... but if you do the reverse, you take your un-limited track, apply reverb... and then limit that, smashing both the peaks and the reverb decay. A heavy reverb on a signal then fed into a limiter is going to give you a more obvious, heavily limited reverb as well. Similarly, if you take a track, add a compressor to it, and set up the thrreshold so that it hits at a point to just knock your peaks back but let most of the body of the sustain through and you dig what you're hearing, and then add an EQ before that compressor set for a moderate boost to a certain frequency band... There's a pretty good chance that the compressor is now going to be seeing a different signal with different peaks and sustain than it was before, and unless you're watching what the EQ is doing to the compressor, you could be applying a lot more compression than you meant to, and as you turn up that boost you're changing not just the tone of the signal, but also the way it's compressing. Or the reverse, your compressor is dialed in for some transparent compression, you add a high pass filter before the compressor, and maybe that's enough to knock your peaks down enough that suddenly the compressor isn't doing a thing.

There aren't any hard or fast rules here, sometimes you WANT to EQ before compression for precisely that reason, and sometimes you want to EQ after compression because you want to change the tone of a signal after first doing some dynamic processing... but in both cases, you should know why you're sequencing the plugins in a certain order, or I guess at an absolute minimum knowing that they ARE impacting anything downstream and at least be aware of what those changes are doing.
 
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