When Should You Use Effects?

Although there are no rules in music production, we can get some clues by listening to what’s already been done. Consider how effects have been used:

* Does the use of effects improve the mix?
* Does the use of effects distract from the music?
* Are the effects used appropriate to the musical style of the production?

Your responses to what others have done will undoubtedly reflect your own personal taste--adding distortion to the tuba may not be everyone’s cup of tea--but we should be able to get some general sense of what works and what doesn’t.

Effects like EQ and compression may be used in subtle ways that aren’t always apparent, but there are plenty of examples of effects that are easy to identify. For example, the opening guitar part in Queen’s "Keep Yourself Alive" is a great example of flanging.

When choosing whether or not to use effects on a mix I ask myself what it is I am trying to accomplish by using them. Understanding what it is I'm trying to achieve helps to keep me from overdoing it.

I try to avoid using effects to "fix" a performance and I concentrate on recording the sound I want to hear before adding anything to it. The effects then act as slight adjustments and not repairs. In this regard, I think of the dry signal as my main color, and the wet signal as "hues" or variations of that color.

If I do decide to use an effect to make something sound "larger than life", it is because I am doing it on purpose, akin to using metaphors and similes in writing. Just as figures of speech are used to draw the reader's attention to a particular phrase, the effect is used to draw the listener's ear to the musical phrase or part.

In the end, it all comes down to personal taste. If we study the mixes that some of the master producers and engineers that have come before us have made, we can learn a great deal about what works well for particular styles. We can begin to develop guidelines and parameters that we can apply as good starting points while experimenting to discover our own methods for using effects.

- John Anthony Martinez
Fingerfoot Music Productions