Question about reverb routing

RobMFX

Member
I've had the Axe FX for about 6 months and I have just started to get into experimenting with some more advanced routing. I have noticed that placing the reverb above the normal "line" of Amp, cab, delay etc makes the patch sound much louder and maybe a bit clearer. Why is this and what other things can I try that would make a big difference?
 
If it's sounding louder when routed in parallel it's because you've not set the mix on the reverb to 100% wet, so you're mixing dry signal with dry signal and that adds up to an overall boost in the dry signal.

If you're going to run reverb in parallel, remember to set the mix on the reverb block to 100% and to set the bypass mode to Mute In or Mute FX In. That'll give you "tails" on the reverb when you bypass it. If you don't want tails, set it to Mute Out or Mute FX Out.
 
I've had the Axe FX for about 6 months and I have just started to get into experimenting with some more advanced routing. I have noticed that placing the reverb above the normal "line" of Amp, cab, delay etc makes the patch sound much louder and maybe a bit clearer. Why is this and what other things can I try that would make a big difference?

You're comparing series and parallel routing. At the end of the day they can sound identical in the Axe, but they're two different ways to do things. When you whack it in series, you need to set the mix to get the dry/wet mix you want, and then maybe also bump the output level up a bit to compensate. It's a mix control, so the more wet signal you dial in the less dry signal you have, hence having to bump the overall level back up. When you run the block in parallel, you set the mix to 100% (as iaresee explained) and then adjust where it sits in the mix with just the level. The dry sound is the same level as before you added the effect, coz it's just running in parallel and simply branching off into other rows on the grid in the Axe doesn't cut the level at all.

Where parallel routing can make a difference is if you're chaining several FX together in a certain way. So if you want for example a chorused delay, without any of the initial dry sound having any chorus, you could run from your amp/cab blocks into the delay in parallel (100% mix) and then into the chorus. If you did this all in series, the signal from the amp/cab would hit the delay, then both the dry and wet would pass into the chorus.
 
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