Adding Effects to a Track
Effects enhance the sound of the overall song. Each Real Instrument and Software Instrument comes with a set of professional-quality effects.Each different effect has a slider or pop-up menu you can use to adjust the parameters of the effect. In Lesson 4, you learned how to add effects to a Real Instrument track. You use the same method to add effects to a Software Instrument track in the Timeline.Let's add some Echo, Reverb, and EQ to the Hollywood Strings track. You'll start by soloing the track and creating a cycle region so you can hear how the track sounds before and after we adjust the effects.
Manually Adjusting the EQ for a Track
Now that you've added effects to the Hollywood Strings track, let's add effects to the Acoustic Guitar 2 track. Our goal is to make it sound slightly different from the Acoustic Guitar 1 track.To accomplish this, you'll add Reverb and manually adjust the EQ. Just to keep things interesting, let's use keyboard shortcuts to select the track and open the Track Info window.
1. | Press the down arrow six times until the Acoustic Guitar 2 track is selected. |
2. | Press Cmd-I to open the Track Info window for the selected track. |
3. | Click the Details triangle to reveal the effects settings, if they are not already showing. |
4. | Click-drag the Reverb effect to around 25 on the Reverb slider. |
5. | Check the Equalizer box to enable the Equalizer effect. |
6. | Click the Edit button.![]() ![]() |
7. | Press S to solo the Acoustic Guitar 2 track. |
8. | Press C to turn on the cycle region. |
9. | Listen to the soloed track. |
10. | Experiment with the different EQ sliders to manually adjust the EQ. |
11. | Click the EQ pop-up menu at the top of the Equalizer window to choose a different EQ preset.A dialog box opens to ask if you want to save the file (effect setting) before changing effects. |
12. | Click Discard.As you can see, you can save any of your effects settings as presets. For now, let's stick with a built-in preset. |
13. | Choose Bass Boost from the pop-up menu.This EQ setting boosts the bass end of the selected track. |
14. | Press Cmd-I to close the Track Info window.[View full size image]![]() |
15. | Close the Equalizer window. |
16. | Press the spacebar to play the cycle region. |
17. | Press the up arrow to select the track above (the Acoustic Guitar 1 track). |
18. | Press S to solo the selected track.Now you hear both guitar tracks together. |
19. | Press the spacebar to stop playback. |
20. | Press C to turn off the cycle region. |
21. | Unsolo both the guitar tracks. |
22. | Press Cmd-S to save your progress. |
Mission accomplished. You've added effects to the Acoustic Guitar 2 track to make it sound slightly different than the Acoustic Guitar 1 track.That's the end of the fourth step in creating a final mixadding and adjusting effects. Now it's on to the last step, creating dynamic volume changes over time using Volume curves.