And so I wanted to talk to you today about this thing, which you’ve probably heard of, which is the plugin. Okay?  So  jotting down a few notes. I wanted to try and explain what is a plugin? Okay,  so originally this would’ve been a piece of hardware. A  piece of hardware is an actual physical piece of equipment.  So in music land, you hear about hardware and software, software exists inside the computer,  and hardware is a physical thing.
So your sound card, you know, might be, that’s a, that’s a piece of hardware. The computer’s, a piece of hardware. Software is logic, copy of logic that you downloaded and sits on your computer. It doesn’t exist physically used to in the CDs, DVDs to install it, but doesn’t anymore. You just download it  anyway. Originally a plugin would’ve been a piece of hardware that you would plug in  literally to the desk probably that would sit between your instrument or the voice and the medium you are recording into, such as a tape machine or a computer.
Okay? they would be or still are such things as an EQ unit, okay? You get compressor units, physical compressors, you get delays, you get reverbs, you get guitar pedal type things, distortion boxes, fuzz, all these kind of things, okay? And they would actually be physical things and you can still buy them.  And I wouldn’t encourage, I have to say beginners to really  mess around too much with those and think about investing in any of that external gear particularly.
So I shall say that right from the beginning. because it’s a lot more complicated. So that’s you. Best thing to do is as a songwriter starting out, it’s just sit with  plugins, which exist in the box as we say. And in when we say something’s in the box, we mean it’s in the computer.  So in today’s session, we’re going to explore the basics of how to work with plugins,  exploring where they live, how to insert them and use them inside of logic.
Okay?  So we’re gonna first off talk about our channel strip.  Okay? Now  if I click  down here,  you’ll see on the left  appear all the, all the related channel strips. And if I go up to this channel, my first vocal comp that I finished off last week,  this here  is a channel strip.
Okay? So resume right in  all this bit here and these, all these blue  buttons, sliders, whatever they might be are inserted plugins. Okay? Back in the day an  EQ would’ve been a box on the wall. Compressor would’ve been a box on the wall, another eq,  a delay would’ve been a box on the wall  or a box downstairs.
Pedal board might have been sitting on the floor of the studio and you’d have lots and lots of wires to plug into what’s called a  patch bay. So  that all those things, when you listen to the voice  that was going through all those things,  all those things were activated. Now the first thing I’m going to do now  to begin with is I’m just going to, because this, as you recall, was a channel strip. a preset SAT channel strip, which if I go up here,  click on the library tab,  zoom out,  go back,  it was on the voice ’cause it was a vocal, I was using it on and I pressed on the classic vocal  chain as we like to call it, being a chain of different effects,  okay?
And that came up and appeared with those effects. Now then, just to demonstrate how we’re working with all these, I’m going to go up to  here.
 You say it’s handily inserted, classic vocal here, I’m gonna click on that  and I’m gonna scroll down to reset channel strip,  okay?  You’ll notice while we’re there, if there’s any particular channel strips, combinations of things you really like,  you’ve got copy channel strip.  And if you want to copy all those things, ’cause you like the way they sound and you want to put it on another channel,  you can then go to that channel and paste channel strip,  okay?
Self-explanatory paste, only the plugins, not the volume levels or anything like that. Paste only the sends. Â We’ll come to what that means. But at the moment I’m going to reset the channel strip. Of course I can always save that channel strip if I’ve made something. We’ll talk about that later maybe. So reset this channel strip, Â reset the channel strip, okay. Â Okay, so a plugin. Â Where is that?
And what are they? Okay,  this is the place where we, as it says, click to insert audio effect plugin. Okay,  let’s start with one of the most basic examples, okay? We’re gonna click here  and you can see  that  we’ve got all these different menus, amps and pedals.  These are the recently used ones, of which some of them for me will be what we call third party plugins.
And we will go into that detail in another session, which are basically non-Apple non logic companies, which make  other types of effects. But we’ll talk about that a time for the moment.  Amps and pedals  as you move along here. And you can choose  pedal board, like a guitarist amp designer. So you can put your whole vocal through an amp  for instance.  In fact, let’s just click on that for the sake of it to show you.
So you can see,  I’ll hover over here, I’m moving sideways, hovering, hovering, get to the end mono, I’m gonna click  and it’s gonna open up  this,  which is a,  and then what I can do is, so I forget sometimes I really want to take it  super basic. If I click, see where my cursor is, if I click and hold, I can move the window around.  If I go over to the corner,  you can see that the arrow changes to  a series of two arrows.
I click,  I can resize this  so it’s super huge or super small, whichever I like. Okay,  so this is  an amp,  like a guitar amp. So if I just move, I could just move that outta the way and  I’ll click on the vocal and  I’ll play a bit of the vocal.
Just click, play a bit of the vocal and we’ll hear what it sounds like.  So  if I go here,  this button here,  this turns it off. Okay,  let’s listen to it without it,  it’s nice and clear. If I can turn it back on again.  Go back, play.  There we go.
Okay. Alright, resize the winner so I can see a bit better. Now I can play around with all these things. Let’s turn the game up  and find it will distort it quite a lot  And low. There we are opening up  a whole Aladdin’s cave  of things that you can do with anything.
 The world of effects basically. Okay, if I go to here,  corner of the plugin  hit across and it goes away again.  Now then, so this is where that amp plugin is living.  Let’s go over to the top. I wanna get rid of this browser window.  Goodbye.  So here  in the channel strip,  this is where that plugin is living.
Now there I  can  on the left.  So you can’t see that very well.  As you can see on the left. I can send it off from, from from the channel strip. So when it goes gray, blue is when it’s active,  I can click on the middle.  If I click here, it brings up the plugin window, which is called, this is called the plugin window.
Make it go away again, I click the cross.  Or if I don’t like that,  I can go to the right hand side and click.  And that brings up my plugin list. Okay, you see we go down the list. You’ve got delays,  echoes, delay, designers, sample delays. There are different types of delays. Tape delay, emulating a tape, machine delay, stereo  sample.
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