pre planning for parallel distortion..how many returns?

[Yumid]

So I'm building a template in pro tools 11 and I'm just setting up my aux sends. Im not sure how to go about the parallel distortion, usually i just insert distortion but I'm gonna start doing parallel so might as well start with the new template.


Anyway my problem is that obviously you want distortion to be in the same area of the pan field as the original source. So stereo won't work assuming I'm working with mono tracks. But a mono return will only be able to support one location in the panorama/pan field. So which leaves me thinking..how many distortion returns do i need? One for the centre obviously, 2 for hard left and right..maybe 2 on the midway point between hard left and center for those instruments...see what i mean? I must be overthinking it, how should I go about this?


Im also going to be splitting the frequencies using multi band distortion, so not only would I need one distortion for each mono location, id need 3 (lo, mids and high)


Im wrong right? Sensibly, how many parallel distortion sends would you use?

 

[Ametrine]

To do what you're looking for, it depends on if you have a dedicated multiband distortion plugin. If you don't, you'll have to do some splitting as you suggested.

You'll need two to start; one mono-only send and one stereo-only send. And if you want to split your frequencies into low, mids, and highs, you're gonna need to use a mono and stereo send for each band. So overall, you would need to route 6.

I think splitting your pan field in to left and right is a little much. The stereo send should be enough, but if you need it to be split to left and right, that means you'll need 9 sends instead of 6.

That is a lot of work.

 

[steffeeh]

A little off topic, but you seem to like to experiment with more advanced parallel processing/signalchaining. You should check out the plugin Patcher by Image-Line, really incredible and makes it all a lot more simple! Though I'm not sure if it's compatible with other DAWs, but you might as well have a look at it
Patcher