At some point, you’ll likely want to route multiple sources to a single effect, which is both efficient and economical. Rather than buying a delay for each voice, you can use one delay and a few simple, cheap utility modules. While several mixers have built-in send and return capabilities, I’ll show you how easy it is to set up yourself and offer a few ways to expand on the idea.
To understand the basic signal flow, you can patch a parallel effect processor. Start by splitting your main sound source into two copies using a multiple. Send one copy to the effect, and then reintegrate the affected copy with the dry copy in a mixer. Mess around with the parameters and see what kinds of different sounds you can achieve. Tip: If your effect module has a dry/wet parameter, set it to fully wet since you already have a dry signal.
So, what if you have two (or more) sound sources and want both processed by the same effect? Well you’ll need to add one more mixer and one more mult to merge both sounds before entering the effect. For each voice you want to add you will need one more multiple.
In my experience small, 2hp 4 channel mono mixers work really great for this. Typically you are not going to want to mess with the levels once you’ve got them sounding good. So you won’t need the finger room to twiddle.
By now you should have a pretty solid grasp on how all this works, which give me the opportunity to make the patch more complicated (but still easy). What if you have multiple effects and you want to send one (or more) sounds to two, or three, or four effect modules? Well, in this next patch I show you how to do that, plus add a few improvements for workflow.
The centerpiece in this patch is a matrix mixer and you can use it to set the level of each input send for each output. Imagine a 4×4 grid of volume knobs. The knob at the vector of input 2 and output 3 will set the level for the second source going to the third effect. Carry this idea across all vertices and any or all of the four sources can go to any or all of the four effects modules. Holy shit that is awesome!!! You’ll notice in this patch that I send the dry signals to an additional output mixer. Think of that mixer as you main performance mixer. Sound source 1-4 each have their own channel on the mixer. The stereo mixer output also uses a channel on the output mixer.
Let me known in the comments how each iteration of this patch goes for you? I’d love to hear examples of your implementation of this patch.
Have you tried this patch? How’d it go?