Applying delays on sends

Getting Stuff Done How do I .... ?
#1

Hi there everyone!

Lately I’ve been pretty much full time on music production, for clients and for myself. And thus I’ve also been doing a lot of mixing.
A big part of my mixing workflow is working with reverbs. I like to dial in a good reverb, or use a very nice IR, then send a lot of elements to it. I tend to duplicate the reverb bus so I can have copies of the same reverb with varying amounts of pre-delay. It’s nice, but it’s a little heavy handed on the CPU (with convolvers it’s not that bad), and very time consuming to setup. I’m looking for solutions.

Is there any way to add delay to a send in Ardour? Any script that could help me with that?

If not, no worries, it’s an incredibly case-specific thing, and I’ll get by making some session templates or something.

Thanks for your answers and happy sound ventures to y’all!

#2

The currently possible solution is to use an intermediate bus with a delay-line

e.g.

track A → bus 1 [delay 1] → bus 3 reverb
track B → bus 2 [delay 2] → bus 3 reverb
track C → bus 3 reverb

For the delay, you could use "Allpass Delay line (from swh-lv2), “Micro Delay Line” (from x42 Delayline, Artificial Latency, comes with x42-plugins on most GNU/Linux distros)

–

Each of the internal (aux) sends does have a delayline for latency compensation, but it is currently not possible to manually override and increase that delay.

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#3

Any delay plugin with feedback and dry set at 0, wet full and a fine enough delay time control would work.

One of them is Uhhyou SevenDelay

#4

I mean sure but where would I place it? is there anyway to have the plugin within the send line?

#5

Just like x42’s example wrote above. What do you mean with “to have the plugin within the send line”?

#6

No.

You place it it on a bus. In the example above, bus1, and bus 2 would just be a bus with delays.

#7

Apologies. I missed x42’s comment, I saw only one notification and didn’t think of scrolling up

#8

Oh actually that’s an alright solution. I’m gonna give it a try, thanks!

#9

Indeed. you can also use ACE-delay (comes with Ardour) in that case.

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#10

If you’re on Linux then Holger created a plugin for this:

https://forum.harrisonconsoles.com/thread-11214-post-62954.html#pid62954

I haven’t used it myself. That link is to the Mixbus forum but it would also work in Ardour I expect.

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#11

What if you use two instances of x42’s micro delay, one before the send that adds (pre)delay, and one after that compensate for it ?

#12

@johndev That plugin is a very cool idea. Just compiled, installed and tried it on my system (Manjaro, Ardour 8.10) and works as intended. The cool thing is that you can enable the delay param of the plugin instances you add to your aux bus as an inline control in the Ardour mixer strip, so you can have control over the send delay of all tracks you send to the aux bus in one place.

Set up involves a few clicks more, since you need to:

a) add the plugin to the aux bus
b) open the plugin and open the pin-connections dialog
c) enable the sidechain inputs
d) select the source track and
e) set the send level via the sidechain level
f) go to the source track, double click the send and fix the sidechain connection for the right channel
g) and optionally enable the delay param inline control
h) also optionally rename the Auxit plugin instance to e.g. “Track 1 recv”

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#13

Currently applying this method to my current project and wow. This is really fun!

When the project comes out I’ll make sure to post it on the made with ardour section.

2 Likes
#14

This is why I would like to have the option to send to the master bus as I can to any other bus (0009199: Custom position for signal "out" - MantisBT). Then I could have track A send to master, then delay by α, probably with high and/or low pass filters, then output to reverb bus, track B do the same with delay β, track C with delay γ, and so on for as much of as many alphabets as I need without cluttering the place up with extra busses for each track.