Jlien X

Bristol_Jonesey


No.

Assuming you're running your Fx chain post fader, the level of the amount that's sent to your Fx bus will fade up/down as you adjust the level of the track fader.

Running them pre-fader is a different animal, and should only be used in special circumstances whehn you don't want the Fx to be faded out along with the dry track

I hope I'm wrong here, but I did a little test now.


I create three guitar tracks and routed them to a guitar buss. Then I created an FX bus with a delay plugin and changed the bus name to "Delay". This FX bus's output is Master.
Because I only want to apply delay to the third guitar (which is the lead guitar), I select "Delay" from the effect send pull-down.
I play back the track and I can hear the delay on the third guitar only. Good.
Then, if I want to change the overall guitar level (three guitar tracks) at once, what do I do? I adjust the volume fader of the Guitar bus.
And, even though I moved the volume fader to 0 (which means I don't hear any of the guitar tracks), I can still hear the delayed guitar because it's not the volume fader of the third guitar track that I'm controlling.

Couldn't you just route the "Guitars Bus" and the "Gtr FX Send Bus" to a new intermediary bus called "Guitars plus FX bus", and than route only that tot the master?  Then you can lower the volume of this new bus to affect all the three guitars, including the FX level that is only being applied to the one guitar.  And you'd still have the ability to adjust the FX level only and the gtrs level only.


I often have these separate busses which group to an intermediate bus as part of a general template for most of my projects.  Even if I don't always use them this way (thereby inducing a bit of redundancy in some projects), I like that all my projects are consistent and that I can easily use those intermediate busses should the occasion arise.


HTH

I used to buss everything to individual busses, but have stopped that. I will have a drums buss, but get signal from sends from the drum tracks, and then they get crushed by a compressor. This way there is good output from the individual tracks to the master buss representing some dynamics, but a floor of signal maintained by the drum buss output. 

In other words, having too much control in music is not always  the best thing.

scook


Rather than grouping track volumes, I would always use a buss. That would give me the ability to adjust the tracks separately. But the software that I use does not have a limit on the number of busses, plugins or sends per project. Working with those constraints would radically alter my workflow.

It's not the limit on the number of buses that led me to use this approach, I'll surely upgrade to a higher version if I feel the limitation. My policy is "Don't do/get what's unnecessary because you'll have less time on what you really want to do," and I suggested the fader grouping approach because there might be users like me who are busy writing songs and practicing instruments and prefer to spend less time on tweaking effect parameters and dealing with many buses.

To give you (not particularly you scook) a better example, you might want to use only one instance each of three reverbs (e.g. room, plate and spring reverbs), two delays (short and long delays) and one chorus plugin to make the setup simple, and want to apply them to different tracks (room reverb to distortion guitar, organ and bass, plate reverb to lead guitar and some synths, and spring reverb to lead vocal and clean guitar, long delay to lead vocal and lead guitar, chorus to clean guitar and electric piano, etc.), this volume fader grouping approach can achieve it quite easily (and you can adjust the tracks' volume levels separately by holding Ctrl while tweaking the desired fader, which is why I said "why not take the advantage?").

I consider this approach more flexible, and the only bus I set up now is the drum bus (to apply saturation, mild, total compression, etc.). But what approach to use really depends on the user and the project, so just take this approach as one option that could be of help.
Isn't it nice that we use different approaches and can share them on this forum?

I would, however, upgrade to Producer and dive deeply into the sea of music production, creating tons of buses and loading tons of effects, IF I didn't have to do household chores and work more than 40 hours a week for a job that has nothing to do with music.