User Manual

WAVELAB
19 – 482 The Audio Montage
About the “Upper Track” output option
On the track pop-up menu you will find two items: “Route to Master Sec-
tion and upper track” and “Route to upper track only”. These items are re-
lated to the fact that WaveLab can host plug-ins that modulate audio with
other audio (clip effects only). As an example of this, a plug-in called
“Ducker” is included with the program. This is used for lowering the vol-
ume of one signal, whenever another signal is present. A typical applica-
tion for the Ducker would be a music track with a commentary voice-over
on another track; whenever the commentary voice is heard, the volume of
the music track is lowered by a certain amount.
To set up for this example, proceed as follows:
1. Make sure the “voice-over” clip is on the track just below the “music track”.
2. Pull down the track pop-up menu for the “voice-over” track and select the
option “Route to Master Section and upper track”.
This will route the sound of the “voice-over” track both to the Master Section and to the
track above. In other situations, you may not want to hear the sound of the modulating track
at all, in which case you would select “Route to upper track only” instead.
3. Add a new clip effect slot to the “music” clip, and select the Ducker plug-
in.
You have to use a clip effect for the Ducker effect to work.
4. Start playback.
Whenever the “voice-over” signal exceeds a certain level (the Ducker effect’s Threshold
value), the level of the “music” clip will be lowered (by an amount set with the Damping pa-
rameter).
5. Adjust the Ducker effect parameters until you get the desired effect.
• A similar effect can be obtained using the “Duck according to other track”
function (see “Duck according to other track” on page 453). The difference
is that with the Ducker, it is the actual signal level that governs the ducking,
while with the “Duck according to other track” function, it is the presence of
a clip.
Therefore, the Ducker is the best choice if the modulating track (the “voice-over”) consists
of long clips including silence, while the “Duck according to other track” function is best
used when the modulating track holds a lot of short clips (without silence).