When using effects as hardware inserts within ProTools, you are able to drag in the outboard gear as a plugin on your track. This is great, because it allows you to pre-patch all the outboard gear in advance, and then quickly experiemtn with differnet setups.

Pros

• You can quickly experiment with different setups
  • There is this principle in psychoacoustics that if you spend more than 3 seconds between hearing two different comparisons, you can't remember how the original one sounded
• It is very easy to print the outboard gear onto the track using ProTools "Commit" function

Cons

• When you are recording, you cannot change inserts on recorded tracks
  • (but maybe we can on Aux tracks)
• The way we often send hearback to talent hinges on what comes from the DAW, which means that they will hear what we are doing on the outboard gear
  • unless we figure out a way to send the signal to them pre-insert
    • It might cost us more DAW outputs though (BUT we also have hearback outputs available to us)