Open a track’s effect rack
Select an audio clip on the timeline. The right panel shows an Audio FX section for it, listing the chain from top to bottom in signal order and ending in Out to mix. An empty track reads “No effects on this track.” Do not confuse it with the Effects section on the same panel — that one is visual effects for pictures, and has nothing to do with sound. You can also reach it without the panel: the FX button on an audio track’s timeline header opens a shelf of presets, with Open rack › at the bottom. The button shows a count when the track already has effects.Fix a voice with one preset
Presets are the fastest honest answer to “this voice sounds wrong”. Each one is an ordinary chain you could have built by hand — open it and the individual effects are all showing. Start from the symptom rather than the effect list:voice-clean is the default answer to “fix this voiceover”: it removes rumble,
reduces mud, evens the level, adds clarity, and ends in a peak ceiling.
voice-broadcast is the same idea denser and more forward; voice-warm adds
body instead of cutting it.
Applying a preset appends to the chain, so cleaning a voice and then adding
character is a real thing to do. Re-applying the same preset replaces its own
nodes where they already sit.
Every named job also ships inside a preset at identical settings, so check what a
preset already contains before adding a job on top of it — voice-clean plus a
Reduce Mud job is −6 dB at 250 Hz where −3 was meant. Expanding the preset in the
rack shows its nodes by name, which is the fastest way to see it.
Beyond the corrective families there are Character presets — telephone,
radio-am, megaphone, lofi-tape, pa-system, intercom, doofus-worble,
chipmunk, giant, monster — and Space presets — room-tight, room-natural, hall, slap-echo,
dub-throw. Character presets are costumes rather than corrections, and they are
tuned to be distinguishable from one another, so do not stack two. chipmunk,
giant, and monster shift pitch, so they change who is speaking rather than
what they are speaking through.
Add a single effect
Use + effect in the rack. The menu groups effects the way you would reach for them, in four families:
The menu offers the named jobs in place of a bare
peaking filter, because picking peaking is picking a machine and leaving the
real decision — which frequency range — for afterwards.
Order matters, because each effect processes what the one before produced. Work in
this order and each step hears a cleaner signal than it otherwise would:
- Subtract before you add. Cut rumble and mud first. A voice that sounds dull often has too much low-mid rather than too little top.
- Level after you filter. A compressor reacts to whatever is loudest, and a rumble it can no longer see is a rumble it stops chasing.
- Relationships after level. Carve the music once the voice itself is settled.
- Character, then ceiling. Saturation and space go late; a limiter goes last, where it can actually act as a ceiling. Anything after it is not bounded by it.
peaking rows otherwise
look identical and you cannot tell the mud cut from the clarity lift.
Bypass a node instead of deleting it while you are deciding — it stays in the
chain, out of the signal path, so you can compare without losing the settings.
Use the one-knob controls
Five effects have no single parameter that could honestly be their face — a compressor’s threshold means nothing without its ratio. Those show one derived knob instead:
Evenness, Warmth, and Space are level-matched: the make-up gain, output trim, and
dry leg move with the drive, so turning the knob up does not also turn the track
up. Tightness and Crush are not, because neither has a trim to move.
Editing a parameter underneath one of these knobs is allowed and simply moves the
knob — the chain stores the mechanism, not the knob position.
Even out a drifting take
Even Out Levels measures the track’s own speaking passages and writes a gain envelope. Its target is that track’s own 80th percentile rather than an absolute level, so an already-even track is left alone. Use it when passages drift over a whole take; use a compressor’s Evenness when the problem is word-to-word dynamics. Remove levelling takes it back off.What should happen
- Preview is what the render will sound like: both build the same graph from the same attributes.
- A chain Studio cannot read plays dry in preview so the composition stays workable — but it fails the render rather than shipping a track that sounds plausible and is wrong. If preview sounds unprocessed, suspect the chain.
- Reverb and delay make a track longer than its source. A bed with reverb no longer ends exactly at its clip length; that is expected.