Screen 1. The +/‑ octave delayed shimmer setup.
Dual effects chains offer huge creative potential.
I’ve already covered DIY shimmer reverb in this column, and with a little imagination, it is possible to create many other variations on the theme of less natural‑sounding reverbs that can be put to creative use, especially when working on ambient or cinematic music. Many of these treatments rely on parallel chains of processing, and there are a couple of ways of achieving this in Logic. Perhaps the simplest is to use some or all of the plug‑ins in dual‑mono mode rather than stereo, as this allows you to have completely different settings for the left and right channels. If you are working on a mono track, insert the Direction Mixer first to convert its signal path to stereo.
Octave Delayed Shimmer
Let’s say you want to place an eighth‑note delay before one side of a reverb, but leave the other side working normally. All you need to do to achieve this is to insert a dual‑mono delay before the reverb, set one channel to 100 percent wet, zero percent dry with an eighth‑note delay time and then set the other channel to zero percent wet, 100 percent dry. For a single delay, set the feedback to zero. Feed this into a dual‑mono reverb and you have your delay offset. Of course, your dry sound will also be affected by the delays and reverbs, so if you want to have full control over the wet/dry balance, copy the audio part to a new track and use that as your dry signal.
With this arrangement, you can set the two reverb paths identically, but you can also bring in further processing that differs between the left and right paths. For instance, try applying heavy filtering to a longer reverb on one side so that the timbre of the reverb appears to change as it decays. Another simple trick is to use a dual‑mono pitch‑shifter before the reverb to sharpen one side by a few cents and to flatten the other by a similar amount. This adds a useful texture to the reverb. Or you can shift one side up by an octave and the other down, with different delay times feeding each side. This stacking technique can be used to create novel stereo treatments using any effect plug‑ins that offer a dual‑mono mode. Again, use a copy track as your dry signal, as this allows you to set the effects fully wet. If your dry signal sounds too dry, you can also add a dash of conventional reverb to that, and if your delay sounds still come across as too distinct, you can put two reverbs in series to really diffuse the sound as shown in Screen 1. Logic’s pitch‑shifter is not the smoothest around, so I’d suggest you pick Manual mode and set both Delay and Crossfade times to maximum. This loosens the timing slightly, but as we’re processing reverb, that doesn’t really matter, and it does produce the smoothest results.
For the Screen 1 patch, I start with the Direction Mixer followed by a dual‑mono tape delay. This is set to delay one side by one second and the other by 1.7 seconds, 100 percent wet — though you can always pick a tempo‑sync option too. This feeds a dual‑mono pitch‑shifter with one side set to +12 semitones and the other to ‑12 semitones, though you can also experiment with fourths and fifths. Again, this is set to 100 percent wet. Next, I’ve used Logic’s Enveloper to slow the attack of the effected sounds so that they don’t come in too abruptly. After that come two SilverVerbs in series, both set to 100 percent wet to really diffuse the shifted sound. Mixed in at a modest level, this produces a very atmospheric effect.
Using a similar strategy, you could place something like a Scanner Vibrato emulation before the reverb (Rotary Speaker doesn’t have a dual‑mono option, and the same is true of some other Logic plug‑ins), again set for dual‑mono mode, with one side running fast and the other running slow. Should you want to use a different effect entirely before each channel of the reverb plug‑in, simply insert both effects before the reverb but after the pitch‑shifter, again in dual‑mono mode, then use the wet/dry control of the dual‑mono plug‑ins to essentially bypass the left channel of one and the right side of the other. (The plug‑in bypass control button affects both channels in dual‑mono mode, which is why you need to use the wet/dry mix control.)
Screen 2. Rhythmic pitch shifts with the Tremolo effect.
Pitch Tremolo
Another novel treatment I set up using a chain of dual‑mono plug‑ins was to place a Tremolo plug‑in at the start of the chain (again using the Direction Mixer if it’s a mono track), configured as a tempo‑sync’ed square‑wave panner. By placing different pitch‑shifts on each side before the signal finally hit the reverb, I was able to create rhythmic pitch‑shifts as the two differently processed channels alternated. This setup is shown in Screen 2. If you want to take the rhythmic thing to another level, Logic’s Step FX can be thrown into the mix instead of a simple panner, and you can also add delays. To make the panning effect more obvious, you can put another panner at the end of the chain rather than at the start, to hard‑pan the reverb sound. The best thing about this approach to multi‑effect creation is that you can save the entire setup as a User Channel Strip so that it is always available, and again, you can copy the source audio to a dry track to give you scope for blending the processed and clean sounds.
Taking The Bus
Screen 3. Busing in an attempt to recreate the Meris Mercury X ‘Into Dust’ patch.Another way to create parallel effect chains is to set up bus sends from your source track, each bus feeding a different chain of effects where the reverb is usually at the end of the chain. Putting a reverb (or two) after Logic’s pitch‑shifters is a good way of disguising any pitch‑changing artefacts, as is using the Enveloper plug‑in to soften attacks. There are also occasions when placing a modulation effect after the reverb can be effective, as the strength of the modulation effect won’t be diffused by the reverb.
I used the bus approach to try to emulate a rather lovely effect that I believe is called ‘Into Dust’, created using the Meris Mercury X pedal, where a normal reverb is joined by an octave‑up or octave‑down reverb after a couple of seconds or so. This is similar to the octave shimmer described earlier, but much more controllable when set up using buses. Use one post‑fade send for your ‘normal reverb’, and a second feeding a 100 percent wet, single long delay (no feedback) followed by a pitch‑shifter and another reverb. Unless you’re treating drums, the low‑horsepower Silververb works very well for this type of effect, and the bus fader make it easy to adjust how much of the shifted reverb comes in.
Add another send feeding a similar chain of delay, pitch and reverb, but this time add more delay to the second chain, and if the first send is producing octave‑down reverb, set the second one to bring in an octave up or maybe add a musical fifth. If the onset of the octave reverb seems too fierce, you can always insert the Enveloper plug‑in after the pitch‑shifter and set it to its longest attack time (200ms). Now your reverb tail will morph through three distinct timbral stages as each pitch‑shifted version kicks in. I got close to the effect I was aiming for; mine sounded a little different from the pedal version, but was nonetheless very usable.
This type of long, treated reverb can sound very messy on busy parts but on sparse piano or guitar lines, it can add real magic.
This type of long, treated reverb can sound very messy on busy parts, but on sparse piano or guitar lines, it can add real magic. You can get close to this using the channel insert technique described earlier, where dual‑mono reverbs are used in combination with a copied dry track, but the advantage of the bus approach is that it is much easier to adjust the bus effect levels as well as their pan positions to fine‑tune the effect, and you aren’t limited to just two effects pathways.
The down side of the bus approach is that you can’t save everything as one User Channel Strip setting — you need to save the source track channel plus separate User bus settings for each of the bus chains that you set up. Even so, as long as you name things sensibly, it doesn’t take long to call things up when you need them. If you come across a combination that you might use on a regular basic, you could include your favourite setups as part of a song template.