Still learning a lot about Ardour. Not sure if this is me misunderstanding or by design, so I ask you wonderful people here.
Some effect plugins have multiple outputs.
From plugin to plugin, the Pin-Connections are an amazing tool.
But I was not able to find pin connections for sends.
I found the shared memory send and return system by lsp, but I was wondering if there is something native or if @paul@x42 have this somewhere buried in a feature backlog
If this is not possible, I would be interested to know about the constraints causing the limitation or if I am completely wrong footed in my choice of workflow
My goal is to have something like the splitter in Studio One/Fender Studio, because having too many individual multiband plug-ins does not allow me to work on the overall energy of a specific frequency range. By all means, tell me if I am on a wrong path. Also interested in everybody’s approach to this.
And one last edit:
Gunning for modern drum and bass/neurofunk/EDM sound esthetics, but looking for ways to increase the low end pressure even more, while preserving rhythm, groove in the lows and clarity in the top end.
Pin connections, as I understand them, are focused on the individual plugins themselves and their connections internally within the track.
Connections (including sends) between tracks are not done with pin connections.
My understanding is this: a send creates new external ports from the track which can then be connected to other tracks. In your example of using SurgeXT with multiple outputs, when you create an Aux Send directly below this, the Aux Send will match the number of outputs it receives. In this example, Surge XT has 1 MIDI out and 6 audio out channels and, therefore, so does the send:
When you create a send, you have to send it somewhere, such as a bus. I believe, if you create a multi-channel bus (in this case with 6 audio channels) the 6-channel audio send will map to the 6 channels of the bus. If you then want to treat those connections on the bus individually, you can, within the bus, by employing pin connections to plugins. But you cannot individually control the send level to that bus. And you cannot split the send to multiple busses.
If you want to do that, you will need to get creative with from channel outputs.
Very good idea, I was sure that I missed something. Gonna explore the multichannel sends. Thanks @Majik
Edit1:
Ok, got what I wanted.
Lessons learned.
first mistake, I had strict/IO enabled on my midi track.
Second, I do not need a send to feed into a bus to achieve the split. It is enough to just connect the multichannel output to different destinations.
Do whatever you do during sounddesign on your stereo track.
put LSP Crossover somewhere after that signal in a flex/io track or bus.
If all you want to treat is a stereo sum, enable manual IO in the pin editor.
Delete any unused instances.
Connect the outputs corresponding to each band to whatever treatment you want to give them.
Edit2: Can’t be said enough, but worth the risk repeating myself. The ardour mixer is amazing and LSP plugins are damn powerfull workflow enablers. We are blessed to have these tools at our disposal.
It is essentially a way to treat different channels or frequencies on the same track with their own plugin chain. The difference to using sends and outputs is simplicity, because it all stays within the track as organizational unit.
This explains it pretty well:
The guy goes over parallel routing first and then shows how splitter simplifies this. Bluecat also has a similar thing, but as a plug-in. Melda as well, iirc.
But tbh, I am happy with the LSP Crossover solution, because I prefer having a track or bus as destination and then have the signals level each other out over side chains, with different priorities ( dominant elements depending on the creative vision)
Ardour does not have a built-in frequency splitter, and will never have one. One canonical rule is that Ardour does not do any DSP apart from summing (and metering). This is a plugin’s job (though one could create such a plugin using a Lua script).
You could add a plugin that separates by frequency and then process channels separately, or add “Ace Stereo Routing” before and after a set of plugins for MID/Side processing; but it’s not as elegant as the patcher in S1.
Then again you can load KXStudio : Applications : Carla as plugin in Ardour, and enjoy the power of free/libre software… why build it into Ardour?
Thanks for the insights. Makes perfect sense and I think that design philosophy served Ardour really well, by keeping it lean.
If I understand correctly, splitter is really just a plugin, capable of hosting other plugins, with some internal routing and treatment.
I only scratched the surface of Carla so far and will continue explorations there. Again, thanks for the tip!
Edit: So I went down the Carla rabbit hole, as suggested by @x42 . It easily fills the same utility space as the studio one splitter and then some. Will use this way more often now. Damn cool tool.
But also thinking about this further, I still think it would be a cool feature to just send some channels from a track to a bus, from an arbitrary point in the tracks process chain. Would not count as treatment, right?
