Guys I have a LONG complicated question on this subject, so before i type a 500 word novel, are there any folks out there know much about buses?  Let me know if you have a half decent knowledge of this and I'll type up my question.  Thanks guys. 

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

It may have already been answered.

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

ok...l'll try keep it as basic as i can.  lets create a dummy project. Add in just one track 9an acoustic guitar).  Call it AcGtr.  Now make a bus and call it GtrBus.  So i want to send the track to the bus.  So far so good guys.
Now open the Consol view. We have our single track.  At the bottom of the track we see the input dropdown box and this will be your USB audio device (an m-Audio in my case).  There is also the output dropdown box. By default this says Master.  But if we click the dropdownbox we also see our GtrBus there.  Is this what we select?  Because also in the Consol view, if we cast our eyes up towards the top of the track we see a Send option. And if we click on this we also see our GtrBus.
So which one do we click to direct our track to the guitar bus?   Now there is a more complicated part to this question but i'll wait to see what the answer to this part is first....then y'all better pour a  serious helpin' of Jim Beam. 

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.

Usually track outputs go to buses. Here is a thread that covers a lot of bus/send territory http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/2643507 and there are a bunch more, I just picked one.

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 :) 

Any time.
Now go and make music.

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?
 
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