Stupid noob question re bus/sends/etc.

N

nycbhh

New member
Hi, despite the fact that I’ve been messing with home recording, samplers (GigaStudio and Kontakt) and composing via midi for a while, I’ve just started working with Sonar. There is one very basic concept of home recording that I’ve never understood and it is causing me to have a hard time wrapping my mind around the whole console view section of Sonar. Basically it is the “flow” of a signal through busses, aux, sends – what are these exactly and what is the “route” a signal, say from a midi channel takes in order to have effects and such applied and then finally sent to the sound card? Can someone explain to me the whole world of channels, busses, sends, etc in layman’s terms? It would be much appreciated, and I’m sure will help me in understanding everything else in my home studio (mixing board, GigaStudio, etc) as well as Sonar.

Thanks for any light you can shed on the subject.

Brad
 
Hi Mixsit, thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

I read the posts and pulled up the diagram in Sonar. I don't know why, but this particular subject really fries my brain!
 
I've never worked in Sonar, but pretty much the difference between an Insert and a Bus is the insert in located in the Input section (effecting the signal permanently) and the Bus is part of the Monitor section (what you see on the screen) and thus is used as a discreet Aux channel that is mixed in with the dry signal. When you create an Aux channel you will then need to mix the level out the Send (amount of energy going to the Aux channel) and then mix the Aux channel as a discreet separate channel.
For example. If you used a compression as a plug-in on the same channel the only signal you would have available to you would be the signal compressed. If you used a Aux bus for compression you would then be able to mix the Compression and the dry signal discreetly. This is called double compression.
I hope that clears up the basics of Aux. Pretty simple and fun once you wrap your mind around the idea.
 
I'm certainly not the best at recording by any means, but I just don't mess with all the bussing business... I just mix it and export it as it is i guess, is that horrible of me?
 
i'm curious as to which (insert effect vs. send effects) tax the CPU harder, my computer was not made for this shit, it gets tripped up in no time at all with plugins, makes it a pain, cuz i would really like to have more things happening on my tracks
 
Not sure why there would be a difference (?)
There's the extra routing with busses and aux sends, on the other hand the whole point of doing it that way is to gang up on the effect so you can run fewer.
 
mixsit said:
Not sure why there would be a difference (?)
There's the extra routing with busses and aux sends, on the other hand the whole point of doing it that way is to gang up on the effect so you can run fewer.
Click to expand...


i don't know that there would be either, but i just know i get jacked up after adding only a few simple ones, right now i got 3 instances of boost 11 on 3 different vocal tracks and then 4 instances of chorus on 4 tracks, so there are 2 tracks with one each of chorus and boost 11, etc. i can't handle really anything beyond that, it's lame. The real problem i'm having is the send levels and whatnot, can't seem to get those to work for shit, so i've just been using them as insert effects, which means i have around 3 extra plugins working at any one time, i'm getting to the point where i'm gonna have to mixdown my vocal tracks and do further processing from there, not fun
 
word to that, that's what i do, and it seems to be helping tremendously, don't know why it took me so long to figure it out, but when i record, i use the input echo, so i can hear myself better, and if i leave the latency down that much, it the delay on the echo is way bad, so i just turn off all the effects bins and set the latency faster when recording, cuz i don't need all that shit when i'm just tracking a vocal, then i readjust and turn the effects bins back on when i start mixing, works pretty decent i guess
 
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