LOGIC & UAD-1

LOGIC & UAD-1: DELAY COMPENSATION ON BUSES

UAD-1 Powered Plugins are great sounding and powerful plugins that use a separate PCI card for processing, so do not eat up the native processing power on your computer.

The problem:

Because of the time it takes to access the PCI card there is quite a considerable amount of latency. Logic’s delay compensation means that this is not an issue when used on track inserts (except the one you are recording on), however this does not work on buses for versions earlier than 7.1. In a typical mixing situation you would use compressors on track inserts but reverbs on buses.

The Solution:

The UAD delay compensation plugin (delay-comp) can be used to compensate for the latency caused by plugins on buses. When mixing it does not matter that there is latency as long as it is the same on all signals. It’s therefore necessary to find a convenient way to make sure that the delay-comp plugin applies to all audio not going to the plugins on the buses. Unless your mix gets really complex, this is quite easy. In the example on the right there are two bus sends on an audio track, one to a UAD reverb which causes latency and one to a Logic reverb which does not. By inserting a UAD delay-comp after the Logic plugin, the same amount of latency is applied:

But this only compensates for the bus sends to the reverbs

That’s right, here’s the good bit:

All the track outputs (ie the drysignal) are sent to another bus (bus 3 in this case) instead of the main mix 1-2. This bus has another UAD delay-comp so that both reverb buses and dry signal now have the same latency. All three buses have their outputs set to the main mix 1-2. In this case the UAD delay-comp uses a Plugs setting of 1:

This is because there is only one UAD reverb plugin to compensate for. You could have as many UAD plugins on each bus as you like, as long as you set the delay-comp to the same number.

Here is a more complex case:

There are three UAD plugins on bus 1, one UAD plugin on buss 2 plus a delay-comp set to 2 and a delay-comp on buss 3 set to 3. All you need remember is that on each buss the number of UAD plugins and/or delay-comp Plug value must add up to the same.

This would obviously be more complicated if you had multiple outputs, e.g. if you were using a physical mixing desk. In this case you would need to create busses for each physical output, however if you were using an external desk it would be less likely that you would bu using reverb plugins on the Logic busses.

COMBINING UAD-1 AND TC POWERCORE

You can use a UAD plugin on one bus and a Powercore plugin on another, but in order to make sure you get the same delay you need to sum the UAD-1 and Powercore delay times. If each bus has one UAD plugin and one powercore plugin, the delay will be equal, see example below. Bus 1 has a UAD plugin and a TC delay compensator, bus 2 has a TC plugin and UAD compensator while bus 3 (the output from audiotracks) has a TC and a UAD compensator.