Inserts and auxiliaries provide different ways to process audio, and this month, we’ll demonstrate how you can use them

Jon Musgrave

Jon is a London-based platinum award winning mixer, producer, composer and club remixer with a diverse CV that spans dance, pop, rock and music for media. He’s also a long term contributor to Computer Music. Jon usually handles final mixdowns, which is why we’ve got him to share some of his pearls of mixing wisdom here

When we use plugins in our mix, we’re either replacing the input signal with our processed signal (regular compression is a good example), or adding to the input signal, which is usually the case with delay or reverb.

DAWs, much like hardware mixing desks, provide us with two systems – inserts and auxiliaries – to achieve these tasks. However, individual DAW plugins often include some kind of wet/dry mix blend. If you couple this with a virtually limitless supply of plugins it becomes perfectly feasible to mix a track and not use auxiliaries at all. Nevertheless, this may not be the best or quickest method, and racking up multiple track-specific reverbs can quickly ramp up your CPU usage. What’s more, if you throw blended techniques such as parallel compression into the equation, it becomes obvious there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution.