I want to send outputs from all instruments in their respective section to their own bus for purposes of using common inserts and balancing by section. See pic, where I have choir and strings going to their own FX channels. My question is, if I want to send all the sound from an instrument to its section channel, do I swipe the blue mix slider all the way to the right (as in the pic, where it’s showing +6.02dB for each instrument), or should I set to some middle position? In other words, does that slider only set the fraction of the signal going to the FX, or is it also adding (unwanted) gain?
The reason I ask is that I’m getting saturation and distortion, and I suspect I’m inadvertently boosting the signal somewhere.
Unless I’m not understanding your goal, I don’t think that’s currently possible in Dorico. What you’re looking for is what is called a group channel in Cubase, and the Dorico mixer doesn’t have that capability currently. In your pic, you are indeed adding 6db of gain on the send, so that signal will go to the FX channel, and then after that to the output channel, where it will be combined with the signal from the instrument channel. So yes, that will potentially cause clipping on the output. It doesn’t really help if you set the send to 0db, because the signal will still be combined with the signal from the instrument.
Pulling down the fader on the instrument channel won’t help either, because the send is post-fader, meaning that lowering the gain on the fader also lowers the gain on the send.
If you are on Pro, Dorico has an excellent analyzer called Supervision. If you put that on the last insert of the output channel, you’ll see that adding the signal on the send raises the signal on the output.
I would imagine that at some point, the Dorico team will add functionality to the mixer, with things like group channels and fader automation, but obviously we users won’t know where things like that are on the dev pipeline.
Many thanks for your reply. If I understand what you’re saying, the signal path is as follows: the signal from the instrument goes through the gain slider to the FX channel, which does its stuff, and then sends its output back to the instrument channel, where it is merged and goes to the output channel. I had (mistakenly, it seems) thought that the FX signal went straight to Output. Hmmm, so the net effect of the FX channel is just to consolidate its inserts, avoiding having to place multiple instances on instrument channels?
If so, then yes, it would be nice if the Dorico team added functionality for group channels one day. Thanks for mentioning Supervision. Very handy.
On a related note, it would be great if someone had a diagram that shows the full signal path from the note on the staff, through notation interpretation to MIDI event stream, to VST container, to VSTi, back to Dorico, through audio signal processing and finally out from Output. I’ve never seen this kind of picture and explanation in Dorico’s doc, but I think it would be helpful because it would show the linkages between discrete elements.
That’s correct though, the FX goes straight to output and so does the instrument channel. And that’s the problem, there is now a path from instr to output and FX to output, so the signal is getting doubled.
And I agree, a diagram of the entire chain would be immensely helpful!
Ah, I see. Thanks for the clarification. Hence your earlier comment that lowering the instrument fader doesn’t help because it acts on the signal before it goes to FX. (It’s unfortunate that it doesn’t act after the send because then you could depress the instrument and the FX could then effectively be used as a section bus.)
Incidentally, how is it that you know all this stuff? I don’t come from a DAW world, but is the signal path order common knowledge there? Tks.
Decades and decades and decades of working with both physical and digital mixers. Understanding signal path (and gain staging, which is a whole topic on its own), which in some mixers can be really complicated, is key to getting the sound you want.
I will say though, that I think the Dorico team has done a really great job putting enough functionality into the mixer to let people get good results quickly, without over complicating things. Personally though, I bring everything into Cubase to do my final mix, after getting everything ~%90 there in Dorico.
