Session help - sends - inserts - busses - and headphones.

[Jono_G]

I cant attach a picture so I will have to explain as best I can.
have 1 aux track with a master,
another aux track with a master.
These are routed to two physical outs on the digi002 and go to a mixer. Their inputs are mic 3 and 4.

I also have an audio track you might be able to see with the record button there. I can hear that one through the headphones.

How do I get the aux tracks, to work on the headphones in the session?

Is it possible to have the two mics using the one set of plug ins/one channel as they are the same?

I'm still learning so the routing thing may not be my best pint. If I need to change the IO please try and explan that to me.

Also I know this may seem dumb and I am reading up on it but can someone go through the sends and inserts and bus thing with me.

I know inserts are for plugins like EQs etc, but I see people with them on sends in some sessions. How does this work. Is a send to send one channel to another? And what is a bus. I am googling all this and have a protools book but sometimes the obvious things arent so obvious. Thanks

[cwsand]

Well it's set up basically like a physical mixer would be. You might want to look up some tutorials on YouTube as it's too involved to answer all your questions here - though once you have a basic understanding of it it's simple. You should look at your I/O setup in Pro Tools as it's all dependent on that - and you can customize your I/O to suit your needs with mono/stereo ins and outs - which is how you would set up one stereo input for 2 mics.

[Jono_G]

Been looking at tutorials all day and reading my book, still very confused.

I created another Aux track with its output set to stero 1-2, and on the first aux I put the first "send" to "headphone", this allows me, at a low level to hear through the headphones whats going into aux 1.
But* the plug ins I have in use for aux one are on a master for this channel. I cant really remeber why they are on a master or there is a master but because the plug ins were being used live, someone advised me to do it this way. So how can I do what I have done up there but with the plug ins being monitored?

So the headphones are a "bus"? Is that correct? Then the other busses 26, 27, 28 etc what are they about? And how come some people have compressors etc on the sends?

Because that new aux tracks output is set to stero 1-2 that also means whats being monitored on the phones is going out on 1-2?

[cwsand]

Best thing you can do is to upload screenshots of both your MIX window and your I/O setup and post a link to them here so we can see exactly what you're trying to do.

[Jono_G]

Right, I couldnt find a simple tool to take a snapshot of the screen on XP, print screen is very poor quality.

Basically there were two aux tracks. Each with a mic input. . These had a master fader each beside them. Now I cant remember why this was but anyway the plug ins were on the master faders,5 plugins, EQ, Desser, Gate, Compressor, and final limiter. These master faders were routed to the output 3 and 4 and 3 and 4 went to a mixer. So the processing was working in real time if you get me.

But I couldnt monitor them through the headphones. I was wondering how to do this.

Today I got rid of the master faders, switched the plugins over to the aux tracks themselves. And did a "send" to headphones, which I couldnt hear but when I did the send to 1-2 I could hear them.

Basically I would like to know how I can have the two mics being processed by the one set of 5 plugins, the two going through a stereo channel could work as their outputs are going to a mono channel on the mixer so it wouldnt affect it really.
And how I can hear this on the headphones. In other words if I had an audio track armed for record with the same mic attached when I click arm for record, I could monitor that. I would like to be able to monitor these tracks in the same way as that but you cant record an aux track.

So I know there is a bus called "headphones" I know whats that for, even though I can't hear them, what are the other "busses". And how do some people have compressors and so on on a "send".

If someone would like to suggest a screen grab tool for XP I will get a pic up. But at this stage my pic isnt really relevant since ive changed things.

[cwsand]

Well basically your headphones are going to be whatever you have going to outs 1 & 2. You can send the aux channels to both outs 1/2 & 3/4 by holding the Alt & Windows keys when assigning the outs ( I Think - I'm not in front of the computer right now.) You can name a bus whatever you want in your I/O - Busses are used to send signal from one channel to another. Hope that helps!

[albee1952]

Originally Posted by Jono_G

Been looking at tutorials all day and reading my book, still very confused.

I created another Aux track with its output set to stero 1-2, and on the first aux I put the first "send" to "headphone", this allows me, at a low level to hear through the headphones whats going into aux 1.
But* the plug ins I have in use for aux one are on a master for this channel. I cant really remeber why they are on a master or there is a master but because the plug ins were being used live, someone advised me to do it this way. So how can I do what I have done up there but with the plug ins being monitored?

So the headphones are a "bus"? Is that correct? Then the other busses 26, 27, 28 etc what are they about? And how come some people have compressors etc on the sends?

Because that new aux tracks output is set to stereo 1-2 that also means whats being monitored on the phones is going out on 1-2?

Your solution here is to simply skip 1&2 and use the rest on AUX sends(a master is not needed for the AUX sends, really). You will need to work at the 64 buffer setting and avoid Low Latency Monitoring(as that kills the AUX sends) but it works fine as long as your computer is up to the task. I take a slightly different route. My head phone amp has 4 sections(Behringer HA4700) and a master stereo input. I feed the MAIN signal into the master input, then use 4 mono AUX sends to give "more me" to each of 4 players(custom cables required for this, but they are easy to make if you can solder). This setup does not allow the engineer to solo stuff, but once things are going in properly, I rarely feel the need to solo during a recording pass.