Check out musician/engineer Rick Fowler's review of this book.

Many novice users unknowingly squander their DSP resources by trying to put a separate D-Verb Plug-in on every track. This eats up their CPU power like there’s no tomorrow, and it’s completely unnecessary. If you were mixing a 24-track song on a traditional mixer/tape machine setup, it’s highly unlikely that you would hook up a separate reverb device for each track, even if you wanted them all to have reverb. It makes a lot more sense to use auxiliary effects sends to put groups of tracks through a smaller number of reverb devices.

Pro Tools provides aux sends and returns for effects, but many people haven’t had enough experience with analog mix-ers to understand how they work.

D-Verb is a Digidesign reverb Plug-in which is available in TDM, RTAS, and AudioSuite formats. Many Pro Tools 001 and TDM users have either purchased D-Verb or received a free copy with their system. If you don’t have it, you may be able to download a demo version that will work for several days. As of this writing, Pro Tools Free only works with the Plug-ins that come with it, and D-Verb has not been included.

Note: Pro Tools Free users will not be able to participate in some of the following exercises because PT Free does not include D-Verb or stereo tracks. Versions prior to 5.1 do not feature stereo tracks either, but in most cases you can use two mono tracks instead. You should complete as many of the steps as you can because it’s important to learn how to show and create sends.

The following steps show how to run several tracks through one D-Verb Plug-in using auxiliary sends and returns.

1. Pro Tools provides a window (not in Pro Tools Free) that tells us how much strain we are putting on the computer. Choose Windows>Show System Usage to display it in the Edit window. Put it in the upper right hand-corner so you can keep an eye on it. Open “Lesson One - 11 aud del” and save it as “Lesson Two - 1 start.”

2. Type +Shift+N (Ctrl+Shift+N) to pull up the New Track dialog. Click on “Mono” and select “Stereo.” Click on “Audio Track,” select “Aux Input,” and then press Return (Enter). Rename the track “D-Verb.” From now on this book will refer to these auxes as “channels” instead of tracks, since they’re functioning as aux return channels and don’t contain audio files.

3. Set the input to bus 1 - 2 (Stereo). Leave the output set to OUT 1 - 2.

4. Under Display, select Edit Window Shows >Inserts View.

5. Click on one of the D-Verb channel’s Insert Selectors (one of the black buttons) and select multi-channel plug-in > D-Verb Stereo. The D-Verb Plug-in window appears. In the D-Verb Plug-in window, turn the input level up to zero. (For some reason it defaults to -4.)

6. Go to Display > Edit Window Shows > Sends View. A new column appears labeled “sends.” Note that there are 5 sends (indicated by a diamond shape) for each track.

7. Click on the first “send” button on the Drum track and choose bus > bus 1 - 2 (Stereo). The Send window for the drum track will appear with a virtual sliding volume control resembling a fader on a mixing console. This “fader” will be used to control the signal from the Drum track to the D-Verb Plug-in.

8. Mute the Rhythm and Lead Comp tracks and play the Drum track. Click on the “fader” and move it upwards until you can plainly hear reverb on the drums. The reverb effect you hear is coming from the D-Verb channel. You should be able to see its meters moving.