I’m looking into Direct Summing to incorporate into my workflow because I find the regular routing system in Cubase to be a pain (Tiny, clicky, finicky menu)
I’m thinking of setting up a separate mixer dedicated to Direct Summing routing, but there seems to be a limit of 8 destinations. Is there a way to increase the amount of DS slots in the mixer?
Any other workflow tips to consider?
Thanks in advance!
Yeah the 8 slots is a hard limit. However I’ve never found it limiting because A) they don’t need to be the same 8 destinations B) it’s trivial to change on the fly if needed.
In the screen grab below, the first 5 channels’ routing destinations are different than the next 2 which are for guitar routing or the next 3 for vocals. Similarly the sub-mixes on the right have different destinations depending on what they are.
Before I switched I spent a lot of time thinking through how to create a bussing structure that was both standardized and flexible. For a couple of months I took note of when & why I added Group Tracks into a Project - which revealed the gaps and missing elements in my then current Template. So top of the list is just taking the time to really think it through. There are also a bunch of initially hidden and unused Channels just waiting to be used. For example you can see destinations "Sub1’ to “Sub4” which are not initially used.
If you right+click on any of the Destination lists you can Copy & Paste them which is useful while building. Unfortunately Quick Link doesn’t let you paste to multiple Channels (unless it has changed in 12). However hard linking the Channels does allow you to do multiple Pastes - so sometimes it’s easiest to Link-Paste-Unlink.
One gotcha when using Direct Routing is that when you Render In Place you will end up with a blank file unless you have your routing set to the first Slot. Doesn’t matter what destination the Slot is set to, just that it’s the first. So when rendering you need to 1) set it to the first slot 2) Render 3) set the routing back to the correct slot. Or you could set things up so the first slot was the destination you’d most likely use for the Track.
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This is great information, thanks Raino!
It’s too bad about the Render In Place caveat because I like to quickly select a bunch of events and render them all at once. But I’ll try it out on my next job and see how it goes. Thanks for taking the time 