Sends and buses

Just post question. "Half decent" can mean anything. We have everything on this noard from novices to grammy winners so I am sure your qiestion will get answered

But I would still like to see a 500 word question.

If you want to send a track to the gtrbus in your case you have to do this by the output of the track. Instead of master, you send it to the gtrBus. The send on top is for effects like a reverb or delay. Here you can add a bus called GtrVerb and when you send the track signal through here to the GtrVerb bus , you are sending the dry signal of the guitar to the reverb to add this effect to the guitar. Hope this helps.
 
You have to set the input of the gtrbus to the name of your track. You will also have to set the output of the GtrBus to master in order to hear the guitar.

Thanks Danny and Skook for the cool info.  Hey Danny, you actually covered the confusing second part of my question without even knowing it. You see i bought a great video set from the cakewalk store on mixing and in one of the vids the guy sends a track to a bus using the OUTPUT drop down.  But then he used the SEND option to send the same track to a different bus because (as you mentioned in your message above) he was using an effect. But sadly, there is no explanation in the video why he did this.  So i was very confused as to why a track has two ways of being directed to a bus and why the same track was being sent to two different buses.  so thanks for the replies guys.  Great help as always from the forum experts :) 

In general, many Tracks go to Buses, while Buses go to the Master, which then goes to actual the physical output.  You send the Tracks to Buses to treat similar instruments, well, similarly.  So backing vocals go to the same bus where you can add the same EQ, compression and even reverb so they jell (a pseudo-technical term) together.  Same for the guitars.  Same for the drum.  Other tracks can go directly to the output bus.  This methodology developed from recording consoles, which was the way to wire actual analog hardware. The engineer would, for example, send all the drums through a buss w/ a pair of 1176's on it to punch up the entire kit, or guitars through the SSL bus comp on an SSL board.  And most studios didn't have an unlimited number of hardware effect units, so it was a bang for buck way to get the most out of hardware.
 
The same goes for sends.  Sends developed as a way to "tap off" the signal and send it somewhere else - like monitor sends for live music or headphone sends in the studio.  For mixing, it is a way to put another level of treatment on a sound and share it between several sources.  Say a nice reverb.  You could slap it on the guitar bus, but your lead guitar is going to be louder than your rhythm and the more reverb it generates make it seem more distant, while the rhythm guitar sounds almost dry. Make a send buss (which feeds back into the guitar buss), slap the reverb on it, and you can send different amounts of the dry signal to the reverb buss, so the rhythm guitar sounds all psychedelic  while the lead is dryer and comes to the front of the sound stage.  Again, this development was prodded by the fact you didn't usually have a couple of lexicon reverbs just waiting to be used, so if you could make one do double-duty that was good.
 
It just adds another layer of flexibility.  When you are just starting out mixing, you probably won't use it esp. on basic singer-songwriter stuff or even rocknroll.  Some of it you will incorporate into your workflow, and most importantly use as a problem solver at times once you understand it.  In my guitar example above, you can spend a lot of time deciding whether to bring the reverb sound back into the guitar buss, back to the main, or put it on another buss with different compression/EQ.  Not that it will change the sound much, but it is interesting to figure out.  You probably won't do that if you are getting paid by the project (unless you want it to eat into your hourly wage), but if you are getting paid for absolute sound quality or doing it for your own project on your own damn time why not?
 
@

Think about why you are using the reverb. It defines the space around the instrument.
Yes, ultimately, everything should end up at your master bus, but by isolating the space and the instrument(using the send to one bus and the track output to another), you can control each independently. You can move the instrument around in the space, such as pulling it forward for more definition.
That may not make sense at first, but play with it for a while.
This may help:
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Working-with-Buses-m1302521.aspx
It's an old thread, based on an old product, but the idea is the same. Hopefully the interface doesn't throw you off.

I just recently started using buses, thanks to this forum. For what it is worth, I am fairly new to using Sonar in the first place, at least on the level at which I use it now.
 
My drummer has 10 mics for his kit, 2 of which are overhead and he is not done yet.
 
For the kit as it stands now, I use a buss for the overheads and a buss for the remaining drums.
 
This is very useful in mixing and leveling the overall output and feel of the kit.
 
I also use FX buses. I still use FX bins for individual tracks, but sometimes to get what I am looking for, I use a buss.
 
I am sure that is because I am not that good at what I am doing yet.
 
If I need to have more than one type of delay effect (in different parts of the lead) on the lead guitar, I will end up using a buss for the second delay effect.
 
I create all of these envelopes for the first delay effect and then when I try to use the the same process for the second effect, I gets all convoluted and messed up and I am sure this has to do with how I am write enabling, which that in itself requires much work to get correct, but I digress. So, instead I just create a buss and it's done.
 
I just finished a few tracks using all of the above, and it is essentially my first time getting it close to correct.
 
I love doing it and have spent enormous amounts of time editing these tracks to get what was just a "jam" in a room where everyone shared the same four non-acoustically treated walls, to a decent sounding song.
 
EQ, levels, transients, FX, gains, fade in/out, track editing etc. etc. I actually took the original tracks and exported them just so that I could A/B them with my finished work, so that I could judge my own efforts. I can say that there is no comparison to those originals or the old way of how I did things before I used busses.
 
 
 
 
 

Hi RobertB.  OK, i see what you're saying about being able to move the sound around using the dry and effects sounds.  This is something i'll just have to go and play with.  I'm looking forward to testing a track with a dry sound plus a send to an effects bus.  I think this would be useful especially if using reverb as i find reverb can be overdone and washes the sound out.  So perhaps a little dry sound in there could help. 
Hi Cactus, just to clarify, i was only using one guitar track in my example just to keep it simple.  I too would not be using a bus if i only had one track in a real world scenario.  Such as bass as you mentioned yourself. 
Thanks for all the replies guys.  lots of good links in some of those replies and yes it's true the screenshots are from earlier versions of Sonar but i'm guessing the theory of it is the same.