Everything here is built in: a full dub sound with no plugin at all. Three effects sit on send buses shared by all the strips, a chain of effects sits on the master, and each strip can hold an insert.
The three effect cards
At the top of the window, one card per bus: DELAY, REVERB and bus 3. Each card shows its main settings and lights up in its colour while its effect sounds, tails included.
The name of the effect on each card is a menu: pick the built-in effect, or an Audio Unit plugin.
The dub delay
A tape echo. Every repeat, the first one included, goes through the filters and the tape saturation, so the repeats get darker and rounder as they fade.
- Time: in milliseconds, or locked to the tempo with SYNC (1/16 to 1/2, dotted 1/8 and dotted 1/4 included). Changing it while echoes run bends their pitch, like a tape.
- Feedback: how many repeats. Up to self-oscillation: the echo feeds itself and howls, held by the tape.
- Wow and flutter: the tape wobbles.
- Low cut, high cut: filters inside the loop.
- Heads (MASTER page): the head patterns of a Space Echo, 1, 2, 3, 1+2, 2+3, 1+3, 1+2+3.
- Ping-pong (MASTER page): the repeats bounce between left and right.
The reverb: plate or spring
Choose the model in the menu of the REVERB card.
- Plate: a smooth, dense plate.
- Spring: the reggae spring tank. A hit comes out as a falling boing. Only the spring can be crashed (C).
Settings on the FX page: decay, damping, predelay, low cut, tone.
Bus 3: phaser or flanger
- Phaser: the big Bi-Phase phaser of 70s reggae, two phasers in series, deep and resonant. Settings: rate, depth, resonance, center, stereo.
- Flanger: a tape flanger, same knobs.
Both give only the shifted sound. Mixed with the strip’s own sound, they carve the swirl: send a strip into bus 3 and turn the return up.
Bus 3 takes the name of its effect everywhere on screen: PHASER, FLANGER, or FX 3 with a plugin.
The master chain
On the MASTER page, in the order of the sound:
- Big knob: King Tubby’s high-pass filter from his MCI board. Twelve steps, from off (20 Hz) to 10 kHz: 70, 100, 150, 200, 300, 500, 800 Hz, 1, 2, 5, 10 kHz. Each step is a plateau you hear. Turn it up to thin the whole mix out, snap it back to OFF for the drop.
- Kills: the isolator of a sound-system preamp. Three knobs, BASS, MID, TOP (split at 200 Hz and 2.5 kHz). They only cut, never boost. All three up, the sound is untouched.
- Dubplate: the sound of an acetate played a hundred times. Narrower, saturated, slightly wobbly. A second knob adds crackle.
- Pull-up: the rewind gesture (R), on the whole master.
Each stage does nothing until you touch it.
Strip inserts
Each stem strip can hold one effect between its stems and its fader. Choose it from the strip’s Insert menu, play it on the INSERTS page.
- Sub: adds the octave below, following the bass. The “boom box” of the sound systems.
- Auto-wah: a Mu-Tron III style envelope filter. Play louder, the filter opens (or closes, in down mode). Made for the skank.
- Any Audio Unit effect: a compressor on the bass, a filter on the keys.
A plugin in an insert sits in the direct path of the strip: set its mix as you like.
Patching the buses
On a dub board, you patch a return into a send and the effects start feeding each other. Here, each bus can also feed one other bus:
- Delay into the reverb: each repeat a little further away.
- Delay into the phaser or the flanger: the repeats start to turn.
- Delay into a filter plugin on bus 3: a filtered echo.
How:
- On the card of the source bus, open Send to and pick the target.
- Turn the matching knob up: strip 8 of the FX page (DLY→, REV→ and the bus 3 one). The delay and reverb ones are also on strip 8 of the MIX page.
A cable then runs between the two cards, dashed while its knob is at zero, with the signal travelling along it. Chains work (delay → phaser → reverb). A target that would close a loop is greyed out, so effects can never feed back into each other without end.
Out of the box, no bus feeds another: each one only goes to the master.
Before or after the fader
By default the sends are taken after the fader: pull the fader down, the send goes down with it. In Settings (⌘,), switch a bus to before the fader (pre-fader) for the classic move: the fader goes down, the strip still feeds its echo.
Audio Unit plugins
Any Audio Unit effect installed on the Mac can replace a built-in effect on a bus, or sit in a strip’s insert.
- On a bus, set the plugin 100 % wet: the dry sound already reaches the master through the strip.
- Open plugin window on the card opens its interface.
- On the FX page, the bus’s six knobs become macros: under each knob, pick the plugin parameter it drives. These choices are remembered per plugin, in every tune.
- Plugins run in a separate process: one that crashes falls back to the built-in effect, and stays in the project to be reloaded.
- A plugin missing on this Mac: the built-in effect stands in, a warning shows, and the plugin stays in the project for the Mac that has it.
Loading or removing a plugin is refused while playing (a notice says so): it would cut the sound for a fraction of a second, so stop playback first. Plugin latency is not compensated: fine on a bus, audible in an insert with a plugin that adds latency.