Routing Question

[Alkamist]

Hey guys! I have recently hit a wall with something I've been trying to do. I have this house song that I am making and I'm routing a bunch of stuff to a compressor that is sidechained by the kick. The way I did that is by making an audio track (that has the compressor on it) with input monitoring on. Then I set the "Audio To" of each track that is being compressed to send to the audio track with the compressor on it.

This all works great, except now I've decided I want a filter sweep that works on multiple tracks within the same instance of the plugin. The first thing I tried is doing the same thing I did with the compressor and making an input monitoring audio track with the filter plugin on it while sending audio from desired tracks to it. The problem with this is that if something is being sent to the sidechain compressor, the "Audio To" slot is taken up and you can't add more from what I've found so far. So in other words, with this method each track can only be sent to either the sidechain compressor or the filter sweep but not both.

You might say I can just slap the filter on the same track as the sidechain compressor, which would work, but what if I want to send something to the filter without it being sidechain compressed? I also don't want to put the filter on the master because I want some things to be unaffected by it.

If you have any ideas for me I would greatly appreciate it!! Thanks!

[ollyb303]

You could use the send/return tracks.

[mharris]

How about creating a new track to specifically hold the filter and set its 'Audio To' chooser to the compressor track.
Then if you want something compressed you send it to the compressor track, or if you want it filtered and compressed, you send it to the filter track.

Unfortunately this set-up doesn't allow you to have something filtered and not compressed. You just have to accept that some "ideal" set-ups aren't possible and instead take the compromise. - In this case, if you actually did want all three routing possibilities, you'd probably need the filter effect duplicated on another track to provide the "filter without compression" routing. Not ideal, but certainly workable.

[Alkamist]

I feared that might be the case where I would have to do something like that. And I can see using the send/return tracks for this, I'm just usually reluctant because it usually ends up being messy.

As a side question, does anyone know if you can switch send/return track identities without having to do really annoying duplicating sequences? In other words say I had a delay on send A and a reverb on send B and now I want the delay on send B and the reverb on send A, I can't seem to find a way to easily switch them. And that may seem really stupid, but it matters. An example of why it matters is I use an Akai APC40 and it has encoders for sends A, B, and C, but only those ones. So what if I'm using send D as well but I realize that I want send D to be on send A so I can control it via the APC 40? Am I doomed to copy send A and paste it to send E and then move send D to send A and then switch send E to send D (which as you can tell is annoying)?

Thanks for all the help so far!

[JadedEvan]

I feared that might be the case where I would have to do something like that. And I can see using the send/return tracks for this, I'm just usually reluctant because it usually ends up being messy.

As a side question, does anyone know if you can switch send/return track identities without having to do really annoying duplicating sequences? In other words say I had a delay on send A and a reverb on send B and now I want the delay on send B and the reverb on send A, I can't seem to find a way to easily switch them. And that may seem really stupid, but it matters. An example of why it matters is I use an Akai APC40 and it has encoders for sends A, B, and C, but only those ones. So what if I'm using send D as well but I realize that I want send D to be on send A so I can control it via the APC 40? Am I doomed to copy send A and paste it to send E and then move send D to send A and then switch send E to send D (which as you can tell is annoying)?

Thanks for all the help so far!

Regarding rearrangement of your sends - if you are trying to juxtapose two SENDs (switch A with B), shouldn't you just be able to rearrange the SEND by dragging it the same way you rearrange tracks? This is off the cuff, not sure if you're permitted to do that.

Regarding your dilemma with three SENDs and the APC 40 - tricky issue. If you want to access sends unavailable on the APC40 *through* the APC40, could you route SEND A into SEND D? Your resultant audio path would be Track > Send A > Send D > Master. This raises another issue about how to control the blend to that SEND on the APC40, which I do not believe you can do.

Does anybody know if there is a way to integrate the APC40 default mappings for racks in the SENDs? Unfortunately it seems like the only way to do this without a whole bunch of hoopla on the APC40 would be to route your audio to regular channels, then have those map exclusively to the sends.