Mixer effects, one by one

All five react to how loud a signal is, so the choice comes down to the job. Use COMPRESSOR to even out a sound and, with its timing controls, to change how its transients hit. CLIPPER is the blunt one, slicing peaks flat for extra loudness and bite. LIMITER is a lookahead design intended for mastering. NOISE GATE deals with the quiet end, shutting out whatever falls under its threshold. And SIDECHAIN is a compressor steered by another signal, for when one sound should make room for a different one.

These six all work on frequencies, and they run from simple to elaborate. LO-CUT and HI-CUT do one thing each, removing what’s under or over a point you set. BANDPASS keeps one band and loses the rest. EQ is for shaping tone across three bands. FILTER is the one to pick for movement, with several filter types, an envelope follower and an LFO. ISOLATOR is DJ-style, with a level for each of three bands that can drop away to nothing.

Two echoes and two spaces. Pick DELAY for precision: separate left and right times, tempo sync and a filter of its own. Pick TAPE DELAY for character, as it imitates analogue tape loops and lets you dial in some wow. For space, FREEVERB is the basic choice, while PLATE REVERB has a dense, bright tail and more to adjust, including decay time and pre-delay.

These six add motion, or move the pitch. CHORUS is the first stop for widening and thickening a sound. FLANGER and PHASER are both classic sweeping effects, and the phaser adds a STAGES control. AUTOPAN shifts a sound around the stereo field. RING MOD is for the more extreme end, since ring modulation tends to sound metallic in general. PITCH SHIFT moves a signal up or down by as much as an octave, and lets you blend it with the original.

These four deliberately make things less clean. BITCOOKER gives digital damage, lowering the bit depth and sample rate with some jitter if you want it. DRIVE is straightforward waveshaping distortion. WARBLE copies the unsteady pitch of a turntable or cassette. VOCODER is the odd one out: it imposes the contours of a voice on a carrier sound, and the result is a talking pad or synth.

These are tools more than sound effects, and each has one clear use. UTILITY handles quick fixes to a channel’s gain, phase and left or right signal. METER lets you see what’s going on, with peak, RMS and LUFS readings that go down to -90 dB. TUNER tunes an instrument from whatever signal is on its channel, and has nothing to set. MIC brings your microphone into the mixer. TEST TONE generates a signal to work with. STEREOIZER is the exception that does change the sound: it spreads mono out into wide stereo, and the low end stays in the centre.