I question of Buses

   I understand the concept of Bussing, but my question, to pinpoint it is, I have a master bus, followed by 3 other busses, one for the rythm guitar tracks and one for the drum kit and I put one in for the bass guitar as well because I needed to mix 2 distinct sounds together. Sorry back to the question, where should I be sending my Bus outputs? Like do I bus the tracks and then output to a MASTER BUS or output to my soundcard which is called MASTER? I never really used to think about this stuff.

Unless you are stemmixing or making a headphone mix, all tracks go to a bus (master or otherwise).  All sub buses go to SONAR Master bus.  The SONAR masterbus goes to the interface's Master bus as per DeeringAmps.  The terminology is rather redundent, which causes confusion.

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THE GREAT THING ABOUT BUSSES IS....

instead of having to use up all your plugins on, say, every track....

you can put one across, say, the GUITARS bus...
and one across the DRUMS bus....
and one across the VOCALS bus...
etc.


then, on final mixdown, if you want to program in dynamic changes in volume, for example...

instead of automating every track, you can simply automate the ONE BUS

get your 'faders up' mix happening, then on quiet sections, you can automate the DRUM bus from 0db (which should be the default level setting for all sub busses) down to , say, -2db..... then back up to 0db when the band comes back in...
that kind of thing.


i will often separate out my rhythm guitar tracks, and automate the RHYTHM GUITARS bus to allow vocals to pop up slightly in sections...
i usually have more than one bass guitar track, at least two, so if i send them both to a BASS bus, and then limit the bus, and automate the bus track instead of the 2 bass guitar tracks, it's easier to control the whole thing together.

etc......
ad naseum.

all of those sub busses are routed to MASTER

master, is routed to the output of your soundcard.

make sure your busses are LINKED......
and in stereo.....

and use busses to create FX sends, and route from individual tracks to the FX bus, whether it's delay or reverb or whatever.....
this is a much more transparent sound than putting an fx directly into a track...
tho, sometimes that's exactly what you need to do, of course...
i'm talking big picture stuff here....