New to Buses

Not sure I understand the question.   The purpose of a bus is to sum the like tracks together to make mixing easier & for additional processing.   For intance, If you have 3 vocal tracks you can create a vocal bus & send the output of each track to that bus, now solo the bus & mix the level of the 3 tracks so they are correct relative to each other, then if you later find the vocals need to come up you can adjust the bus rather than each track individually, plus you can add one reverb (or other fx) to the bus to put all the vocal tracks in the same sonic space using less CPU than having 3 instances of that plug in running if you put it on at the track stage. 
Yes the output of the tracks should go to the chosen bus then the output of the bus goes (generally) to the master, the masters output goes to your soundcard.   Hope that helps you out.

Hi Justin,

There's a bit of a naming difficulty with busses in Sonar. Stuff in the buss pane (or buss section of the Console view) is all the same but, depending how you're using them, should be considered slightly differently. If you're addressing it using the main output of the individual channel you can consider it a buss. If you're addressing it via a send in the individual channel you could consider it as an 'aux return'.

From the way in interpret what you're saying here it sounds like you're using auxes / sends to send signals (you mention 'turning on the posts', sends are switchable between pre and post (fader)). Also you mention that the channels are outputting to your soundcard. So here's a suggestion to try:

Make a buss called 'master' and route it to your soundcard out. This will be your only route to the 'outside world' all your 'aux returns' and 'busses' should ultimately point to this individual buss (doesn't matter how many steps it takes to get there and busses can go via other busses if you want but everything that gets to your soundcard must go via the 'master'.

Let us know a bit more about what you're trying to achieve and we can help you a bit further but this should give you something to play with and get you headed in the right direction.

Child