So I’ve got a basic rackspace with a piano and a couple of effects, and have put gain and balance plug-ins before and after each effect’s plug-in to create send and return controls for the front panel. I’ve also got a gain and balance directly out of the piano plug-in to control its dry level. Am I using GP’s best method to accomplish this effects routing? Am asking because of something I’d noticed while bypassing or muting the sends. Muting a send behaves exactly as expected, no signal passes thru that send and the rest of the signal remains unchanged. Bypassing a send will also cut the signal to its effect block, but seems to increase the level of signal going to the other effect send while the overall volume of the sound also increases. Though the workaround is simple, I can’t figure out how or why bypassing the send does this. Mute and bypass behave alike and as expected when applied to the returns.
PS Had a screenshot to include, but clicking ‘upload images’ on this post did not work on either Safari or Firefox.
If you bypass any block (plugin) GP will effectively remove it from the processing chain altogether.
If your send (gain and balance control block) was cutting the volume to say -10dB and you then bypass it - it means that no cut is applied (0dB) and therefore you would see increase in overall gain. Same would happen if you were to boost the gain but then bypassing would decrease it.
Though absolutely making sense theoretically I run into a similar problem.
Creating an effect sidechain having piano main out to master out and having a reverb and delay step in parallel (traditional aux send/return with 100 percent wet reverb signal), bypassing the reverb gives a much fatter piano sound than having it active (even with the reverb output signal set to zero to counteract on any possible phase effects).
Did the same with a delay plugin and triple checked unity gain setting of gain/balancing blocks and fx plugin(s).
It seems that a parallel chain really does something with the main signal. Now that shouldn’t be happening, does it?
If I understand correctly - you are taking your piano dry output and sending it to the main out and to your effects at the same time?
If you control the effects “volume” or “send amount” using the gain control and then bypass it (the gain control) - you will end up with a setup as if the gain control wasn’t there - e.g. you would have maximum volume/100% send. Now you are most likely sending this effect output to main outs again which means that you would increase your overall volume significantly. If you think in terms of traditional mixing consoles - bypassing the gain control BEFORE the effect means that the channel effect knob would be turned all the way up and bypassing it AFTER the effect would mean that the FX fader on your console would be all the way up.
Does this make sense or did I miss something obvious?
Yes this does make sense, however not fully addressing my case.
The issue was that I wanted to take a reverb or delay fully out of the chain. Thinking about it, this would double my gain on the output (+6 dB on a meter) by bypassing the plugin since it is a double connection. I shouldn’t use bypass in this case, but just MUTE the sends from the instruments or the return gain of the delay.
Solved.