CEP: Understanding the 'Bus' mixer vs. the channel we/dry

[welldonep]

Hello all ... I've always been a little confused about the best way to control your effects levels (l'll use reverb as an example) when using a Bus in Cool Edit Pro.
I know how to assign a group of tracks to a 'bus', but the way I see it, there are 3 areas to adjust the reverb/effect level itself. 1) in the effect parameters ... reverb level; 2) the Bus mixer for the effect (dry/wet), and then again in the channel mixer (wet/dry).

I find this a bit confusing, and was wondering which is the best way to work with these settings. It's seems like at least one more setting than needed, as in my mind, once you have the reverb/effect selected, you should only have to make changes to the parameters of the effect as you see fit, and then choose a send and return level for each channel/track assigned to that Bus. By having the Bus mixer's wet/dry levels and the channel's wet/dry levels, I am unsure I where I should really be adjusting the wet to dry to get the best sound applied to the tracks.

Can anyone better explain how the Bus mixer works in conjunction with the channel's wet/dry send/return? And/or give me an example of how you might set a reverb yourself for a vocal track and/or, in this case, a group of vocal tracks.

I tend to get decent results, but I mainly just mess with the settings until I find a place where I can tell the reverb is working, but that it's not so obvious. I just wish I had a better understanding of how the Buses are working.

I would greatly appreciate any input that anyone has to offer on this, as this seems a little convoluted to me, but I think I'm just not grasping CEP's way of handling effects through a Bus.

Thanks much.

Peter

 

[mixsit]

How about some basic for start?

An effect inserted into a channel makes a serial path (i.e. one after another') within the channel. The wet/dry mix within the effect provides its own internal parallel mix path. I.e. a self contained mixer.

A channel aux or effects send is a dry parallel path.

Where a bus collects the various aux sends an effect inserted there would have its internal mix set 100% wet (presuming there was not some other reason to do another parallel path there.

Bus level then becomes your global wet' level, and the aux sends do your individual channel relative wet levels.
At that point you have now basically an external set of parallel paths doing wet/dry mixes, and have come full circle.

I'm not familiar with Cool Edit Pro and I don't know what the distinction of the channel mixer (wet/dry) would be though.

 

[welldonep]

Thanks for the reply. I can be a little slow on the uptake when trying to digest such information, so I think I'll need to read that a few times to fully understand.

It does seem like Cool Edit handles this differently than other audio programs. I was asking a friend, who is an experienced engineer (who typically uses ProTools), and he said it was quite different, and he himself was a little thrown off by what I was showing him in Cool Edit. I thought he would quickly understand how the different wet/dry settings worked in conjunction to one another, but he himself was having a hard time understanding how it was working. It made me feel a little bit better that he didn't immediately grasp it (although I'm sure if he spent some time with it, it would make sense to him ... but I myself am finding it hard to understand the best way to handle these settings.

In CEP, the default for the Bus mixer is always 100% wet, and 0% dry, but I would assume the sliders are there for a reason. Just wondering if I should simply leave the Bus mixer settings at the default, and just use the channel wet/dry to get the desired amount of effect level??

Again, I appreciate you taking the time to respond. In the end, I try to use my ears even though I may not fully understand it. I'm getting decent results, but am hoping to get a better understanding of how this is all working.

Cheers!

peter

 

[mixsit]

You know what is perfect in getting a clear handle on all these routing functions is the block flow diagram. This is the go to way to see and understand these sorts of things.