Is there a way to duplicate a 2 Bus, or any bus for that matter? I’m used to Pro Tools where I can duplicate a bus and use different plugin settings or even chains and switch between/toggle the two of them to hear the differences in real time. It’s a very useful feature. Is there a way to achieve this in Cubase?
In Cubase you would use Group Tracks.
If you are on Cubase Pro use the Direct Routing feature to achieve a quick a/b comparison.
Can you elaborate on how that works or is set up? Just to reiterate, the idea would be to have say “2 BUS A” and “2 BUS B” with different settings on them, and be able to listen in real immediate time. In Pro Tools, any number of Busses can have the same input, so duplicating is easy. Since this is done with Group Tracks, can a Group Track share the same input? If not, how is what I brought up with regards to the way this works inPro Tools achieved with what you mentioned?
The busses have an input? I thought in Pro Tools you have to tell each track individually to feed its signal into a bus. Am I mistaken?
That is correct; the busses have an input. You do have to feed individual tracks into a bus, wether by Send or by the Track’s Output, but that’s no different than telling Cubase where your tracks should go into a Group Track or Effect Send. But, with Pro Tools being able to simply duplicate the bus, the inputs and outputs stay the exact same, so you’re simply getting two versions of that bus, in which you can treat them however you like.
The bigger reason for this question though is that if I want to audition two different parallel compressors on my drums, I can duplicate the Bus and try a different compressor flavor on each Bus, select both tracks, and then mute one of them, then hit Shift + M in real time to toggle their mutes and hear the differences in real time. I do this with 2 Busses as well sometimes to audition different chains in real time, so I’m wondering how/IF this can be achieved in Cubase?
Pro Tools has a different system then Cubase.
Here is what I meant with Direct Routing:
You don’t mute a track but rather switch the output routing of the feeding track.
Now, if you have a lot of tracks feeding into the group(s) and you cannot link them (ie. you switch one of the channels and all the other switch as well) you might wanna insert a dummy group track in between the feeding tracks and the Group A and B. You can then use that as your switch.
You are correct. Unless something has changed recently that’s exactly how it works: a “bus” is a sort of ‘floating’ path that you can use as either a destination or a source.
For sure! They’re different DAWs, but some features don’t have to be DAW specific and stay that way, but more so implementing quality of life/practical features. Duplicating Group Tracks and keeping the same routing would be a very, very welcome feature for the reasons I listed above as opposed to having to make a separate Group Track just for feeding to another couple of Group Tracks for toggling. The end result is KIND of the same, but more unnecessary work, so I hope something like that can get implemented in the future.
So, are you routing things to a Group Track from the Direct Outs as opposed to the Track’s Output instead? How does that work? Do the tracks just not go to the Main Outs and are disabled because they’re going through the Direct Outs or something? I’m wondering of the practical way to do this when selecting a bunch of tracks and doing a 2 Bus via a Group Track.
Technically the first slot of Direct Routing is the regular output routing slot. And then there are seven additional ones, which allow you to quickly change the target.