Now that we have made a mix of the four individual sounds, let's make a second copy of the resulting "chord" (meaning any sound that is made of other component sounds). We will process this second copy with some reverb and EQ to make it sound distant.
First make a copy of the mixed audio file and place it to the right of the original You can copy and paste, or option-click and drag to get a copy. Verify that thee copies sound the same. Select the copied segment and find the "AudioSuite" menu. From the "EQ" submenu of "Audiosuite" choose the second.
You are then presented with controls in a floating window. Choose "lo-pass", the rightmost button, and set the cutt-off frequency to 3.0 kHz or a little higher. Set the "cut' to about -6 dB or -3dB. Click "Prievew" to hear a preview. Select "bypass" to hear the sound without processing. Adjust your control values if you want. Press "process" when you are satisfied. ProTools will do its thing and then return you to the edit window.
Now, we will go throught the same process to add some reverberation to the sound. Choose "D-verb" from the "Reverb" sub-menu.
Once again you are presented with a floating window. Choose the appropriate settings on the reverb. I suggest a medium or small hall, and a reverb time in the neighborhood of 3-5 seconds. Try some different settings and preview them. Select "process" when you are satisfied. See below for a discussion of distance cues. Also note that there is a lo-pass filter available in the D-verb plugin. You may wish to do the lo-pass filtering here when makingdistance cues.
Every sound in your mix must be 'placed' in the listener's field of vision. This aspect of editing and mixing is often overlooked by beginning electronic musicians.
Imagine that your sound field as a grid, with the horizontal dimension corresponding to panning, and the depth dimension corresponding to distance. I shall present you with a grid to depict a simple scheme for representing soniclocution (the technical term for locating sounds in space) in a stereo field (the space that you will be working with):
| FA | FB | FC | FD | FE |
| MA | MB | MC | MD | ME |
| NA | NB | NC | ND | NE |
F= far, M = middle, N=near, A= hard left, B= left, C= center, D = right, E= hard right
First you will want to pan your source sounds. You will want to hear at least a little source sound (without any depth processing) panned to some location. Except for an extremely distant sound, you will need to hear a little of the source sound to get a sense of where it is panned. For the farther sounds, you will want to simulate depth.
There are 3 ingredients needed to simulate depth:
One of the best ways to set this up is to figure out two sets of processing, one for middle distance, and one for far. Make a submix of material to be included in the middle distance, and another for the far distance. This mix will have all the panning already in it, but when you change the outputs to "Bus", the panning will disappear. Process each submix with the appropriate amounts of reverb and roll-off...more for the farther distance. You will have mono soundfiles that you will then want to pan to the center. Changing the original sounds' outputs back to Analog 1-2 will bring your panning settings back (or your panning automation). You then can check the levels of everything and apply volume automation to the 'reverbed' submixes. Everything should be output to the main outputs in the end. Later we will see a more clever--and easier once you get the hang of it--way of locating our sounds in the mix.