Add new comment

You can go with an insert in a qtractor output bus. All tracks that are supposed to share a bus insert plug-in must be assigned to that same output bus.

In case you didn't notice, qtractor output buses are in fact mix-down devices that can hold a plug-in chain and send/return inserts as any individual track.

Yep, I'm doing this for adding a single compressor across multiple vocal tracks, for example. It could be used for shared reverb, too, but in that setup there's no way to control how much reverb each track gets -- they're all going to get the same level, based on the mix controls in the reverb plugin itself.

With sends, the idea is that each track still outputs to the master bus as it normally would, but you also take a copy of that track from some point in its signal chain, reduce its gain, and send it off to the input of a separate bus, which hosts a 100% wet reverb plugin. Instead of controlling the amount of reverb by tweaking the plugin, you leave the plugin 100% wet, and tweak the gain on the send instead; if it's sending a loud copy of the audio to the bus, you'll end up with a lot of reverb for that track in the mix, or if it's a quiet copy, you'll get just a little.

Once you have multiple tracks set up in this way, with sends to the one reverb bus, you can adjust the amount of reverb added to the mix for each track just by tweaking the gain on the send from each track. All the "send" needs to be in Qtractor is half of an insert (just the send part of it, with no return), but with a gain control.

It sounds like I might be able to do this by doing some creative routing, like adding a new bus for each track and having those buses all output to the reverb bus so I can use the bus's fader to control the reverb amount. That will be complicated, though, and it sounds like there's no easy way (or perhaps no way at all) to route a track to both the master output bus, and to these other buses that I'd be creating.

Hopefully that explains it well enough, but if not, let me know and I'll see if I can draw a diagram or something :)