Setting up DRUM BUS COMPRESSION in Sonar?

My suggestion would be to open up your drumtracks (in console view) , right click to the right of the master buss and choose insert stereo buss.  Go to the output at the bottom of the individual tracks and choose the buss you just created. You would generally use a send for an effect like reverb. 
 Your compressor,limiter or whatever you wanted to use,  would go into the effects bin,  in the stereo buss that you created. To use parallel  compression you could duplicate the tracks that you wanted to use it on and just not compress them.  You could put them on their own buss as well. There are also some compressors that allow you to use parallel compression within the compressor.
 Hope this helps.

shakespearesmansion

I'm inserting a SEND on the drum tracks I want to compress. This send is post-fader. I'm panning the send just as I have panned the track. What I don't like is that whenever I move my fader the compression changes. I tried pre-fader but then the panning doesn't work - everything is centered.

What am I doing wrong and how do I do this right? I'd also like to try the parallel compression trick, but unsure how that works in Sonar.

It is difficult to deduce what stage you are at along the signal chain here but I'm deducing that you are talking here still at the point of individual drums on mono-tracks and using pan to position toms?  Firstly just noting where you mention the pan stays centred pre-fader is expected behaviour as the send will be ignoring the tracks pan setting, you'd have to apply the pan on the sends actual bus in this case.  Better still if it is toms you are panning set the pans on each track and group them by routing them into a stereo bus.

Secondly drum compression is a big subject and there are many methods of approaching it in fact there are many ways of just achieving the one recognized approach you mention 'parallel compression' which basically just consists of running a (usually heavily) compressed signal alongside (underneath in terms of level) a dry one.

As it is such a massive subject there is a mixing template that Jonas Aras put together that covers some flexible drum routing quite nicely, and features '2 stage' compression, once you have it figured how it works you should be able to experiment with different routings that suit you better.

The template is available here and covers a whole mix in general without any fancy plugs just standard Sonar ones and indicates how good a sound you'll get for a bit of knowledge in preference to an expensive list of boutique gear.

http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?m=843953

The template link is the bottom one in Jonas' signature.  There's some instruction in the File/Info page once you have the project open and more about the template on the thread itself.

The interesting thing is that there is not just one specific "right way" to do this.... just about anything goes...if you are satisfied with the results.

I compress the drums in the final mastering. Since my drums are midi...their sound is fairly constant and consistant. There is a compressor in at least one of the platforms I use for drums, so compressing in the master mix works for me.

IF... I were to mix live drums, I'm sure I would probably use a different approach and compression in the tracks would be an option to explore.

I'm new to mixing drums, and I'm wondering how you setup drum bus compression in Sonar? Also, I'm very confused about buses in general. It's new territory for me

There is no right and wrong way. The best thing for you to do is to read about up on the subject so you understand all there is about it. You are new as you said, so you must learn how a why to use a compressor. There are just so many ways and variables to take into account, so unless you learn, youll never find the right sound/settings for compression. After you read up and learn, you can use your ears and adjust settings to taste.
Its the only way to learn drum compression
Cj

I will rarely do the same thing twice when it comes to compressing drums, but a common approach I take is...

* Send kick drum and bass guitar to a separate bus to be compressed together
* Usually a compressor on the kick drum and snare drum tracks (and maybe other drum tracks) before going to the bus, but not much - if there are certain hits that are too loud/soft, I would prefer to address that using a volume envelope.
* On the drum bus, multi-band compression works well so you're not squashing the whole kit because of an overload in just a certain frequency range.

I will say the only mixing I've done of real drums has been with a really good drummer on a good kit with good mics, so that obviously made the job a lot easier. On MIDI drums, I don't compress too much because you can control that with tweaking the velocity. But I still often compress the kick and bass guitar together and might put some compression on a drum bus with a high threshhold for certain situation where the sum of the parts is a little too much.

One thing I frequently do is run the drums through the Cakewalk Tape Sim plug (among other things) in a bus.