Third Take

Sonar’s stereo buses are great tools when it comes time to mix your project. The concept of buses is rooted in the world of analog mixing consoles, but Cakewalk has redefined the bus into something even more powerful than aux sends or subgroups. Sonar simply has stereo buses, and you can have as many of them as you want, and route them however you want. To understand the power behind this concept, take a look at how buses are used in three common scenarios: Submixes, Effects Buses, and Parallel Compression.

Outputs and Sends

First, you need to understand how tracks are routed to buses. Every track has an Output that routes to a bus. The output of the track, after the effects bin, volume, and pan have affected the audio, is sent to this bus.

In addition to the track output, you can add one or more Sends. To do this, right click on the track and choose Insert Send and pick a bus to send it to. (You can choose New Stereo Bus and Sonar will create a new bus for you). Sends also send audio from the track to a bus, but they have additional controls that the track Output does not have. Sends have their own Level and Pan, a button to enable or disable them, and another button that will toggle between “Pre” and “Post.” You may have heard this referred to as “Pre Fader” and “Post Fader,” because the state of this button determines if the track’s audio will be sent to the bus before or after it goes to the track’s volume fader. If it is set to “Pre,” then the track’s own volume fader will have no effect on the audio being sent through that Send. Regardless of whether the Send is pre or post-fader, the level control on the send will control how much signal is sent to the bus – it is like a volume control for the send.

Many tracks can output and send audio to a single bus. Each bus has an output which you can route to your audio interface (sound card), or another bus. In fact, you can even insert sends on buses! The routing possibilities are endless.

Submixes

The first common use for buses is submixing. Let’s say you spent hours tweaking the mix of a drum kit, finding the perfect balance of kick, snare, hi hat, toms, and overheads. Later, after working on the bass, guitars, and vocals, you decide that the drums need to be a little louder. You don’t want to adjust the drums individually, because you like the sound of the kit as a whole – you don’t want to upset the balance between the different tracks that make up the drum kit. You need a submix.

Insert a new Stereo Bus, name it “Drums,” and set the output of the new Drums Bus to your Master Bus. (The output of your Master Bus should go to your audio interface so you can hear what’s playing back.) Now, set the output of each drum track (kick, snare, etc.) to go to the Drum Bus. Now you can control the level of the entire drum kit with the fader on the Drum Bus – without affecting the mix of the individual drum tracks.

I often create a bus for drums, one for guitars, and another for vocals. That way, for example, I can bring all the guitars up or down in the mix without affecting the balance between the different guitar tracks. If you have a lot of background vocals (BGVs), you might have a separate bus for them that outputs to a vocal bus. Then you have two levels of control – you can bring all the BGVs up or down under the lead vocal (with the BGV bus fader), and you can also adjust the level of all the vocals at once (with the Vocal bus fader).

Submixes are also handy in mixing. For instance, if you wanted to take the guitars out of the mix while you work on something else, you can mute the Guitar Bus instead of muting the individual tracks.

Effects Buses

Sonar’s stereo buses have their own effects bins – an essential property that makes them very useful for reverb, delay, and other effects that you want to apply to multiple tracks. The basic purpose of reverb is to add a sense of space, or depth, to the recording – to make it sound like it’s in a natural environment. Having a different reverb on every track doesn’t sound very natural. (Other plugins, like EQ and compression, make sense on a track-by-track basis, though there are some instances where you would use them on a bus; see Parallel Compression, below). A by-product of this technique is that your computer’s processor only has to run one instance of the reverb plugin – saving valuable CPU cycles.

To use the stereo bus for effects, first create a bus and insert your favorite reverb plugin into the bus’s effects bin. When using an effect this way, the settings need to be different than if you were to insert it on a track. You want the effect to be “100% wet” – in other words, you want the bus to only output the sound generated by the reverb plugin. This is because you will be mixing the output of the tracks (the “dry” sound) with the output of the reverb bus (the “wet” sound).

After you have put a reverb on the bus and set it to be 100% wet, set the output of the Reverb Bus to your Master Bus. To begin with, you probably want to pull way back on the Reverb Bus fader – this is where you will be mixing in the total amount of reverb in your project.

Now that your bus is set up, it is time to route some tracks there. Find the lead vocal (or any other track you like) and insert a Send to the reverb bus. Don’t change the Output of the track – that is your “dry” signal going to your Vocal Bus or Master. You want to send a copy of the signal to the reverb bus. Enable your Send and make sure it is “Post Fader.” In this application, it makes the most sense for the Send to be Post Fader, because you want the level of reverb to change with the level of the track.

Use the send level control to change the amount of reverb that the track gets. If you have multiple tracks routed to the same Reverb Bus, you use the send level controls on each track to control the amount of reverb for that track. The volume fader on the Reverb Bus itself will control the level of the reverb for all the tracks – much like a submix.

Parallel Compression

Parallel Compression is a technique that is used to get a “fatter” drum sound, while preserving the natural attack of the drums. You do this by mixing the raw kick and snare tracks with heavily compressed copies of those tracks. (See this article at Hometracked). While you could simply clone the tracks and insert compressors on the copies, there is a much more elegant solution using busses.

First create a new bus and set the output to your Drum Bus (submix). Insert a compressor plugin into its effects bin, and choose a short attack, long release, and big ratio.

Next, insert sends on the kick and snare tracks, routing them to your new Parallel Compression Bus. Enable the sends, and make them “Pre Fader.” It is important to understand why you want them to be pre fader. You’re going to be using the track’s volume fader to mix the level of the drum in the song. If you made the send “Post Fader,” then lowering the fader would not only lower the level of the uncompressed drum in the mix, but also reduce the amount of compression the drum got on the Parallel Compression Bus. That’s not what we want – so make the send “Pre Fader” and use the Send’s slider to mix levels of the the kick and snare tracks getting sent to the bus.

Set the threshold of the compressor so that it really squashes those drums, and then use the volume slider on the Parallel Compression Bus to mix the compressed signals back into the drum mix. Then, when you adjust the volume slider of the Drum Bus, you will be changing the level of your complete drum sound, including the parallel compression sound.

Conclusion

These are three common uses of Sonar’s stereo buses, but definitely not the limits. Because of the flexible nature of routing in Sonar, you can create complex routings – submixes of submixes, submixes routed to effects buses, or even separate main and monitor mixes routed to different outputs on your audio interface. Once you understand how the routing works, you should be able to use buses to make better mixes that are easier to manage.

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