Hey everyone,
Just wondering how to achieve having plugins post fader and pre fader on the same channel. I’ve tried doing this Ableton and didn’t have any luck. Is there a way you can do this in Logic though?
I hope I’ve explained it well haha.
Cheers,
Paul
hey Paul you can do that easily, although Ableton does it a bit different. each send created in Ableton is linked to a return track that can be toggled to pre or post. unfortunately you can’t determine pre and post pan to my knowledge but there are work arounds. ask @justinc
and in Logic it’s easy, just right click the send inserts (buss inserts) and select your preference. I prefer the way Logic handles send/returns (busses) myself and wish Ableton would change it. well I won’t be holding my breath anyhow : )
Hey Sight, thanks for the reply! was meaning to say how to make the Inserts themselves pre/post fader. In Cubase its a feature which they call “Moving Inserts to Post-Fader or Pre-Fader Position” which is probably what I should’ve said in the first place lol.
Danny was showcasing this method of ducking where he would send a mandolin to the reverb (post-fader) and after the reverb he inserted a Pro MB, right clicked it, set it to pre-fader and used Pro MB to duck the reverb using the dry mandolin signal which was really cool!
I don’t know how to achieve the same thing in Ableton or logic though.
hmmm. so I’m not very familiar with the way cubase does its routing but that technique is not hard to do in ableton either. you don’t have to set the proMB to pre-fader unless you absolutely are going to fiddle with the levels of the source track ( I can see why Danny wanted to do it that way though). you just need to use proMB to duck the reverb out of the way of the source sound. Logic should be able to do this just the way you described. Ableton’s onboard compressor will do this easily, but with ProMB you have to achieve it this way:
https://www.fabfilter.com/help/pro-mb/support/externalsidechaining
and then here is the same technique from the Ableton site (you’ll just need to adapt it for return tracks):
beyond this if you want to tap the source signal pre-fader in Ableton or Logic this will take some more reading. if you do I’d love to hear about it : )
Ahh yes I got it now. Ableton’s compressor did it perfectly! If only they did the same for 3rd party plugins.
Thanks so much for the insight haha
Hey Paul!
You can do this using an Audio Effect Rack in parallel, creating your reverb chain, and follow the reverb chain with the AU/VST you want to key with a pre-fx signal form a “tapped” audio track.
(A track that uses the side chain source as the input, with the input set to “in”.)
So what you do is create an audio track, and set its input as the track you want to use as the trigger, select ‘pre-fx’ underneath the input, and set monitor to in… You then route the output of that same track back to the source track and select the AU/VST sidechain as the destination.
It’s kind of hard to explain so I uploaded some screenshots.
The thing that’s awesome about this is that you can save the rack as a preset… And since you can use reverbs in parallel in the rack this eliminates the need for a return, and allows you to compress, saturate or limit the processed signal at the end of the chain to glue it all together…
The Audio Effect Rack is the Isht!!! 
Pics below…
Using a group as an example:
I’ve grouped a couple of drum loops together and added some processing to the group channel, before the audio effect rack.
I’ve named the group “Using a group” so it’s easy to understand…
I’ve then created an audio track and selected “Using a group” as the input source in the image below.
You’ll see I’ve also selected “Pre-FX”…
Pre-fader FX Chain:
The rack on the left has my pre-fader FX chain… Some Hornet VU for gain staging, some parallel compression and a modeled Summing Amp. (You can see the rack after it’s called “Parallel reverb rack with Loopback”. That’s the rack that will be keyed…)
The “Prarallel Reverb Rack with Loopback”:
Here’s the rack that’s let’s it all happen…
The chain on top is called Pass Through. Audio just passes through that chain untouched…
The chain on the bottom is called PreFX Reverb. This is a parallel chain.
The processed signal passes in to the reverb with channel strip processing in the previous image applied.
You can see Pro-MB at the end of the chain, which has its the sidechain set to ‘ext’.
(The speaker icon on the parallel chain should be on FYI… I captured video hoping I could upload video here but no dice… The frame of the video I selected is me toggling the chain’s audio on/off… 
)
Sidechain Destination Routing:
You can see that the audio is being routed back into the parallel reverb chain, with Pro-MB set as the destination in the pulldown underneath the channel called Using a group.
And since the audio is being routed to the rack it automatically silences any audio that would normally play through the channel… Now just save the rack and use it anytime 
Wow, thank you so much for the detailed answer Justin! I’ll defiantly be using this method from now on. There’s always a way to work around something in Ableton haha. Thanks again! 
You bet man! Yeah generally… That said there are areas where Live could improve, and sidechaining AUs is one… But the audio effect rack is pretty damn great and love how it lets you do inline reverb processing and save the chain…
man, I didn’t even think about making a parallel rack… duh, lol. that’s brilliant though
Yeah this is my favorite method for using Reverb in Live. Being able to keep everything glued together is really nice.
What is this? im doing step by step, when I want to reverb a kick I always come here again and again hahahha 
ah I see, it is OFF on one of the images, but it is supossed to be ON, AM I GETTING IT RIGHT?
Hey @brunocg007, I think you mean the speaker icon in the chain called “PreFx Reverb”, is that correct?
yes! the little speaker, but i already figured out that it should be ON (right ?) and just turn the volume down to taste or something
