How to add reverb or delay to a track
In Loop by Zaweba, raise a track's send to bus A for reverb or bus B for delay in the mixer, or put the effect in the track's own chain.
Adding reverb or delay to a track in Loop by Zaweba takes two moves at most. Open the mixer in Studio mode and raise the track's send to bus A, which is the reverb, or bus B, which is the delay. If you want an effect on that one track only, with its own settings, add reverb or delay to the track's own effects chain instead.
Both work. Which one you choose depends on what you're after, and getting that choice right is most of what makes a mix sound tidy rather than washed out.
What you need
Reverb and delay live in Studio mode. Press F3 (or View > Studio mode) and the tabs under the grid appear, including the mixer and the effects. Your song stays exactly as it was; Studio mode just shows more.
Using the sends
Each track in the mixer has volume, pan, mute and solo, and two post-fader sends, one to bus A (reverb) and one to bus B (delay). A send splits off a copy of the track's sound and feeds it to the bus. The bus adds the effect and returns it to the mix through its own return level.
To give a snare some space, turn up its send to bus A. To give a lead an echo, turn up its send to bus B. Because the sends are post-fader, if you later turn the track down, the reverb or delay drops with it, which is usually what you want.
The big advantage is that several tracks share the same reverb. Feed the drums, the chords and the vocal into bus A at different amounts and they sound as if they were played in the same room. That glues a song together in a way that separate reverbs on every track rarely does.
Putting an effect on one track
The effects catalogue has EQ, compressor, reverb, delay, chorus, distortion and filter, and any of them can go on any track, either bus or the master. Add reverb or delay to a track's own chain when you want that track to sound different from the rest: a very long reverb on a single pad, say, or a short slap delay on one vocal line.
The delay is tempo-synced, so the echoes fall in time with the song, and it has a ping-pong option that bounces them between left and right. You can reorder effects in a chain, bypass them to hear the track dry, or remove them.
Keeping the effects tasteful
Start with less than you think. Reverb is easy to overdo; a track that sounds lovely on its own can turn to mush when everything else is playing. Set the send so you only just notice the space, then play the whole song and judge it there.
Keep the low end fairly dry. Bass and kick drums with lots of reverb make the bottom of a mix cloudy. A little on the snare and the chords, more on pads and leads, is a reasonable starting point.
Let the delay do the work in the gaps. A tempo-synced echo on a lead line fills the space between phrases. If it clashes with a busy part, lower the send or move the echo to the other side with ping-pong.
Changing it over time
Effects don't have to stay the same all song. Automation lanes cover volume, pan, sends and every effect knob, so you can raise a send for the last word of a phrase and drop it again, or open up the reverb in a breakdown. Click to add points on the lane, drag to move them and right-click to remove one. The lanes line up with the grid, so changes land on the bar.
Other ways to make space
Sometimes a track sounds dry because it is too loud rather than because it lacks reverb. Try pulling its fader down a little or panning it away from the centre before reaching for another effect. And if you want to compare, bypass the effect for a moment: hearing the track without it is the quickest way to tell whether it is helping.
