Acoustica User Forums

How do I apply an effect to multiple tracks? I wanna compress the whole instrumental separately from the vocals.

Hi,
You could use a " sub mix " track, and enter the tracks you want into that track. Then add the plugin you want . I did that with my live recorded drum tracks. I had microphones on the bass drum, snare, hi hat, tom 1, tom 2, floor tom, and two overhead microphones. The drum instrument tracks were mono, and the overhead microphones were a stereo track. I did a little EQing on the individual tracks. Then I put them in a " sub mix " track. I then used a compressor for the drum sound. You can still control the level of the tracks inserted into the sub mix frack , to get a good mix of the drum instruments. Then you can control the volume of the drum mix with the sub mix volume.
I did the same with the three guitar tracks , my organ sound from my Leslie microphones( 3 ).
This allowed me to get a good mix of the instruments, and allowed me to control the instrument mixes to balance the sound of the piece.
If you would like to hear the piece it is on my SoundCloud page Myran Rivard, piece: Summer Fun.

- Myran

To expand a little, for effects specifcally, you can use a send track. Once you add the send track, add whatever effects you want on that send track. On the mixer, a new knob will appear to send to that particular send track. If you added 2 send tracks for example (maybe you have reverb on one and chorus on another), there would be two new knobs on the mixer. Turn up the knob to increase the send on your particular track(s). If you used a submix, you could route the submix to the send track instead of controlling the send depth on each individual track.

The use of the send track is to avoid putting the same effect or effects chain on each track and taking up processing power but allowing the depth of that effect to be controlled individually per track.