What Is an Effects Box?

Video Transcript

"What is an effects box? It is the physical incarnation of a plug-in, or the plug-in is a digital representation of an effects box. Basically you send a signal from your mixing board to this box. This box processes the sound either adding reverberation, echo, chorus, delay, any host of other effects that they come up with. Verbals and they can synthesize a sound by taking the original sound and adding other sounds to it to make it sound like something totally different, but it's an effects box, it basically puts on effects. This is sometimes used in recreating recording spaces. Say you're playing a piano and you're playing in a totally dead space, but you want it to have depth, like the space that you played it in was huge. You would put a reverb on it with a certain time of diffusion and a certain delay that would represent a space. So basically with this effects box you can recreate the space an instrument was recorded in. Now whether this is a real space where you represent a church hall or guitar room or a drum room or a totally imagined space where there's chorus, synthesized sounds added into your sound to make it sound like something totally different. It basically is to create the space that your instrument was recorded in to enhance the original recording. Now the effects box in the digital realm is the plug-in. The effects box is anything you affect a signal with. This could be reverb, delay, chorus, all these things we talked about previously but it could be dynamics even. Dynamics being compression, gating. Gating is opening the sound channel when there is a signal that breaks through a certain threshold but closing it, the gate, so that there's no signal or complete silence when there is a signal breaking that threshold. A compression is another dynamic that you use, it might be considered an effect in how you use it, but it takes a signal and compresses the signal, kind of making things tighter so you have a bass and it's big and booming, well if you set the compression, any time the signal goes above a threshold it's kind of pushed down back into it, therefore keeping it kind of nice and tight is the way that you might say it. But it does not allow voltages to exceed a certain level so that they're capped right there. And fed back into the signal, kind of keeping things in certain spaces 'cause when you're mixing and trying to put instruments in different spaces in your mix, the bass you want to stay right here and you want it to be really consistent. The kick would be right here, the snare, etcetera. Compression helps you hold the dynamics of each instrument into a certain fixed place in your stereo image and to your mix."