Sound and effects
Effects
Add and arrange track effects, use their controls, and find the full Grid effect reference.
Effects change a track's sound after its instrument. Use a reverb to place a dry drum in a space, a delay for repeating echoes, or a compressor to control peaks. The Device panel shows your instrument first, then its effects in the order you hear them.
Studio has seven original effect cards: EQ-5, Plate Reverb, Tape Delay, Saturator, Chorus, Compressor and Bitcrusher. Additional sound processors are available as modules inside a Grid patch. Their complete controls are listed in the references below.
Add an effect
- Select the track you want to change.
- Open the Device panel in the detail view.
- Choose Add effect at the end of the chain.
- Type in Search effects, then click a result or use Up/Down and Enter.
The browser stays open so you can add another effect. Press Escape to close it. If your search finds nothing, it says No effects match. Clear or shorten the search to show the list again.
You can also add an effect from Library's Devices tab. Single-click selects a Library entry; double-click it or press Enter to add it to the selected track. You can also drag it into the chain at the position you want. The gaps and the two halves of each card let you place a dragged effect before or after another one.
A track can hold 20 effects. At that limit, Add effect is disabled. Repeating the same effect is allowed: each copy has its own settings and bypass switch.
Change the chain
Sound runs from left to right. For example, a Saturator followed by a Plate Reverb distorts the dry instrument before the reverb adds its tail. Reversing them distorts the reverb too.
Each effect card has these controls:
| Control | Action |
|---|---|
| Drag grip | Drag the card to another place. With the grip focused, Left/Right moves it one position. |
| Power button | Bypass the complete effect without removing its settings. The card dims. |
| Remove button | Remove this effect from the track. |
| Expand arrow | Show all four controls, including Dry/wet as a knob. |
| Bottom Mix bar | Drag horizontally to change the mix; the value appears on hover or focus. |
Click a card to select it. Delete or Backspace removes the selected effect. Clicking outside the chain clears that selection, so the same key can act on clips again.
Right-click a card for Bypass, Duplicate, Delete, Save patch, Reset, Move left and Move right. Edit in Grid opens the track’s Grid patch; the menu also offers track freezing controls. Duplicate puts an independent copy immediately after the original. Reset restores the four parameter defaults and keeps the current bypass state. Save patch opens the track's preset area.
The thin meters between cards show level after the instrument and each effect. They help you find where a large increase or loss of level occurs.
Use the controls
Drag a knob up or down. Hold Shift for a finer adjustment. The mouse wheel and arrow keys also adjust a focused control; Shift makes those steps smaller. Home and End move to the ends of its range. Double-click resets the knob.
The original effect cards use a 0–100 scale. Their first three defaults are 42, 64 and 36; Mix starts at 50%. These numbers describe knob positions. A Time value of 50 is not 50 milliseconds, and a Threshold value of 50 is not 50 dB.
The bottom Mix bar supports arrow keys, Home and End. Double-click resets it to 50%. Its purpose is a dry/wet balance: how much processed sound you hear. On several original effects, additional processing still follows that balance. In Tape Delay, the Tone filter remains; in Saturator, Output still sets the level; in Chorus, the short feedback delay remains. Use the power button when you want to bypass the whole device for comparison.
You can right-click supported knobs and Mix bars to attach a modulator. Automation and modulation explain changes over time and repeating movement.
EQ-5
EQ-5 has five linked bands. Frequency shifts all five together; Gain boosts or cuts them together. It is useful for broad colour changes rather than editing one troublesome frequency independently. For independent bands, use Five-Band EQ or Spectrum EQ in Grid.
| Control | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Frequency | Moves the five band centres together around 80, 250, 1,000, 4,000 and 12,000 Hz. The full range is half to one and a half times those frequencies. |
| Gain | Shared gain from −12 to +12 dB. A knob position of 50 is neutral. |
| Width | Shared Q from 0.2 to 3.2. Higher values make the individual bands narrower. |
| Mix | The dry/wet balance at each band. |
You can drag the small response picture horizontally for Frequency and vertically for Gain. It is a compact control picture, so use your ears when comparing the combined sound of all five bands.
Plate Reverb
Plate Reverb adds a reverberant tail. Its Size and Decay controls both affect the room character; Decay is not a duration readout in seconds.
| Control | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Size | The room-size contribution. |
| Decay | A second contribution to the same room character and tail. |
| Damping | Removes brightness from the reverb tail as it rises. |
| Mix | Balances the original sound and the reverb. |
For a reverb with explicit decay seconds and pre-delay controls, use the Grid reverb modules.
Tape Delay
Tape Delay makes repeating echoes followed by a tone filter.
| Control | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Time | Echo spacing, from 40 to 1,000 ms. |
| Feedback | Amount returned for another echo, from 0 to 0.9. |
| Tone | Low-pass cutoff after the delay, from 200 to 20,000 Hz. Higher values leave more brightness. |
| Mix | The delay's dry/wet balance before Tone. |
Time uses a free value rather than a tempo division. For synced echoes, use Delay, Multi-Tap Delay or Tape Echo in Grid.
Saturator
Saturator adds distortion, then applies output gain.
| Control | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Drive | Pushes the waveshaper harder, from a drive factor of 1 to 13. |
| Tone | This control currently makes no audible change on the original Saturator. |
| Output | Gain after processing, from silence at 0 to twice the level at 100. |
| Mix | The saturation's dry/wet balance before Output. |
If Drive makes the result much louder, reduce Output before deciding whether you prefer the sound. The Grid Saturator adds shape selection, bias and oversampling controls.
Chorus
Chorus adds a moving delayed copy and a short feedback delay.
| Control | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Rate | Speed of the movement, from 0.05 to 4.05 Hz. |
| Depth | Delay modulation depth, from 0 to 20 ms. |
| Feedback | Feedback of the following short delay, from 0 to 0.8. |
| Mix | The chorus dry/wet balance before that delay. |
For a small widening effect, start with lower Depth and compare using the power button. Chorus Ensemble in Grid offers independent voices and more tone controls.
Compressor
Compressor reduces levels above a threshold. Threshold rises as the knob rises, so higher values generally mean less compression for the same sound.
| Control | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Threshold | From −60 dB at 0 to 0 dB at 100. |
| Ratio | From 1:1 to 20:1. At 1:1, levels are not compressed. |
| Release | Recovery time from 10 to 1,000 ms. |
| Mix | Parallel balance of dry and compressed sound. |
For attack, makeup gain or detector controls, see the Grid dynamics effects.
Bitcrusher
Bitcrusher adds pre-drive, reduces level detail and reduces sample rate, then mixes that result with the dry sound.
| Control | What it changes |
|---|---|
| Bits | Bit depth from 1 to 24 bits. Higher values preserve more detail. |
| Rate | Sample rate from 1,000 to 48,000 Hz. Lower values make the held-sample character more obvious. |
| Drive | Pre-drive factor from 1 to 13. |
| Mix | Dry/wet balance of the complete crushing path. |
The current controls perform both bit-depth and sample-rate reduction. For quantiser shapes, jitter, dither and separate filters, use Crusher in Grid.
Grid effect reference
The Grid module browser offers additional processors with separate parameter controls. These references give the exact browser names, inspector labels, ranges, choices and defaults:
These are reached through the Grid module browser. A dedicated effect-card display described for a processor does not automatically appear in its Grid module. The references call out the analyser and tuner display limitations.
Tempo divisions
The Grid effects that offer a tempo-division menu use these choices:
1/64, 1/32t, 1/32, 1/16t, 1/32d, 1/16, 1/8t, 1/16d, 1/8, 1/4t, 1/8d, 1/4, 1/2t, 1/4d, 1/2, 1/1t, 1/2d, 1/1, 2/1, 4/1.
The suffix t means triplet; d means dotted. A quarter note is 1/4; a whole note is 1/1. These are note lengths, so their duration depends on the module's BPM. A musical delay can cap a very long division at the longest delay it can hold.
For sharing one effect chain among several tracks, see The mixer.