Group and effect bus routing questions

[deuce251]

I’m sending my individual tracks to group busses (guitar bus, vocal bus, etc.). I have some effect busses set up for comps, revs and delay and have the sends of the individual tracks going to the effect busses. If I mute a group bus all the tracks on that bus get muted, as they should, but if I turn down the group bus fader I still get signal going through the effect busses to the main out. Is that normal since the effect busses run in parallel? The whole point of the group busses is to adjust the level of all the tracks going to that bus (among other things like group inserts). I’ve tried switching the effect sends on the individual tracks from pre to post but that makes no difference.

I’m somewhat of a Cubase noob and figured I’m just doing something wrong with the routing? Do I need to put the effect sends on the group busses only and not the individual tracks?? That would be counter productive as I want to adjust the send levels on each individual track not as a whole on a group bus but also be able to adjust the levels of the group busses, effect sends included.

What am I doing wrong?

Cubase Artist 10

[svennilenni]

@deuce251

I’m sending my individual tracks to group busses (guitar bus, vocal bus, etc.). I have some effect busses set up for comps, revs and delay and have the sends of the individual tracks going to the effect busses. If I mute a group bus all the tracks on that bus get muted, as they should, but if I turn down the group bus fader I still get signal going through the effect busses to the main out. Is that normal since the effect busses run in parallel?

Yes.

@deuce251

The whole point of the group busses is to adjust the level of all the tracks going to that bus (among other things like group inserts). I’ve tried switching the effect sends on the individual tracks from pre to post but that makes no difference.

An audio group does never adjust the level of the tracks going to that bus - it adjusts the level of the summed bus signal.
That´s what VCAs / DCAs are for. But will in your case again influence the signal level going into the other effect busses. Other possibility is to route the fx return to the group also.

[raino]

@svennilenni

Other possibility is to route the fx return to the group also.

This is probably the easiest routing to give you single fader control. An alternative would be to route both your Group and FX to an additional Group Channel.

[svennilenni]

@raino

@svennilenni

Other possibility is to route the fx return to the group also.

This is probably the easiest routing to give you single fader control.

Yes, but what I didn´t mention there, is, that then of course the reverb return is also compressed (if the group has a compressor as insert) which will also change the sound.

[deuce251]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone. I will try them out.

[deuce251]

So after watching a couple Cubase videos I see that VCAs would indeed solve my issue. Unfortunately, Artist doesn’t have VCAs so I will have to work around it until I get Pro.