Stop effect by automation event

I’m recording something, which has a very loud and fast part getting louder and louder, and finally, it should be cut off and lead into a very quiet slow part.

All my tracks have sends to a reverb and to a delay bus. Thats why you can hear a reverb and a delay after sound is cut off. But I want it to be immediately cut off, without any reverb remaining. The logical solution would be to automate the volume of the busses to 0 after the cut, and let it turned off until the effects get unhearable. But I need the reverb and the delay bus on the quiet part. I don’t want to create extra busses on for the quiet part, because I already have lags while recording.

Is there a way to turn off the delay/reverb and immediately turn it on again for the next part?

Thanks for answers! :slight_smile:

It depends on your material; how long pause there is between the stop and where the quiet part begins and the length of the reverb tail and the delay.
If it’s a longish pause and a short reverb and delay you could automate the Aux send levels and mute them before the last loud part.

Another option is to render out the finished song, import it back into Ardour, or some other audio editor, and manually cut out the unwanted bit.
I’m not sure if you can freeze the master bus but but if you can that would be a similar and slightly faster alternative.

If you render and import you probably want to create two files, where one has the Aux sends automated to zero until the quiet part begins. Then you use that as the second part of the song.
Otherwise you could end up with a reverb tail or some delay spilling over from the loud part.

I was going to suggest automating the Mute on the reverb bus, but if I understand you correctly, you rather want to “reset the reverb”.
Depending on what reverb plugin you’re using, automating the “reverb tail” control of the plugin (drop to 0 and back up) might achieve that.

general observation: the right way to “stop” a reverb is going to be extremely dependent on the particular reverb in question. “bypassing” the plugin is unlikely to get the effect you want. the plugin may or may not have a tail control, to allow x42’s suggestion. without knowing and understanding the parameters of the reverb you want to use, i doubt you can get this to work satisfactorily.

Thank you for your answers. I’m using Calf Vintage Delay and Calf Reverb. Changing the reverb tail to 0 is a good idea, but it didn’t work. Maybe I’m really going to create a large pause between those parts, export the project and cut the pause away - this would also solve the problem with the recording lags, because my project is going to get much bigger than it already is.

I’d just duplicate the reverb / delay busses
duplicate the sends on all tracks to the these busses
automate mute and send stuff

Did plugin bypass automation get added to Ardour yet? Google shows that this issue has been discussed for more than a decade yet I don’t see any resolution. Would be fantastic (and is actually required) for my (live) use case.

Ardour cannot provide this feature. Only a plugin knows how it can safely bypass itself in a click-free way.

That being said, VSTs plugins that can do “effSetBypass” are supported since 5.9 (#7266) and LV2 plugin’s bypass/enable feature is available since Ardour 5.0. In those cases bypass is exposed as automatable port.

For all other plugins Ardour assumes that bypass is not click-free and hence it cannot be automated.

Thanks for the info. I’m using GxAmplifier-X (and others) from the Guitarix folks which is an LV2 plugin. When I click the audio track’s “A” for automation and dig into its automation features, there is nothing about bypass/enable available as an automation.

Is that something the developers of the plugin would need to expose as an option or should it be showing up regardless as a default option?

I see that other LV2 plugins like “a-Delay” have an enable checkbox and automation lane. I guess enable/bypass is something the Guitarix team didn’t add to their plugins.

Yes, you guess correctly. I’m not sure what the correct way to click-free bypass GxAmp would be, perhaps internally ramp all parameters to zero, or maybe cross-fade.