Odd Behavior of Soloed Track and Bus

[A Tolerable Quietude]

I'm not sure if this is a bug in Cakewalk, or if I'm doing something wrong.

I've got a project with various instrument tracks, including some drum instruments.  I put a sonitus compressor on an instrument track and a send on a drum instrument track to the compressor sidechain, for some sidechain compression on the instrument.  So far so good, everything works as expected.  If I solo the instrument track, all I hear is the instrument track (with the volume ducking down where the drums would be sounding) but I don't hear the drum, or anything else.

But since I've got more than one drum instrument, I decide to send the drums to a bus, and put a send on the bus to the instrument's compressor sidechain.  This is where things get weird.  Now if I solo the instrument track with the compressor sidechain coming from the drum bus, I hear the instrument, and  I also hear the drums (everything else mutes).  This only happens on the track that's got the compressor sidechained to the drum bus send.  If I solo a different instrument in the project, everything else mutes, including the drum bus, as expected.

I hope this is clear what the issue is.  Is this a bug?  Or is there a setting I need to adjust to make the bus behave as expected when I solo a track?

I'm able to reproduce the result, and I've attached a small cakewalk file that demonstrates this using only stock cakewalk plugins.  Try soloing the epiano track and you'll see what I mean.

Odd Bus Solo Behavior.cwp

[David Baay]

Soloing the track suppresses the ouput of other tracks so their buses effectively go silent but the buses are still active. Since the send is being kept alive for the sidechian and the bus is active, the signal is getting passed to the bus ouput as well. 

If you aren't going to use the Output of that bus for anything, you can just make the Send prefader, and pull the volume down. But a better solution may be send the drums to an Aux track, and Output that track to the sidechain. 

 

[scook]

A sidechain input sums just like a bus or aux track input.

Unless the bus or aux track output is going to be used for something other than the sidechain maybe forget about the bus/aux track and point the sends directly to the sidechain input.

[David Baay]

Duh. Of course. Overthinking it. 😜

[Apeirofobia]

I also think this is a strange behaviour. When you solo the drum track, the piano gets muted, but when you solo the piano track, the drums are still sent to the drum bus.  Why the drums aren't muted when you solo the piano track?

[Noel Borthwick]

3 hours ago, scook said:

A sidechain input sums just like a bus or aux track input.

Unless the bus or aux track output is going to be used for something other than the sidechain maybe forget about the bus/aux track and point the sends directly to the sidechain input.

Indeed a side chain is internally a bus and will sum all sends to that side chain.

Soloed buses are not coupled with tracks so if your solo a bus you will also need to manually solo other other tracks that aren't dependent.

[A Tolerable Quietude]

Thanks everyone for your thoughtful replies.  It still seems like a bug to me, or at least very counter intuitive behavior.

I'll try to explain it this way: 

If I put a send on a drum track to the epiano compressor sidechain and I solo the epiano, the drum track is still sent to the epiano's compressor sidechain, but the drum track no longer goes out to the master bus while the piano is soloed.  That's what I expect.  When I solo the epiano I only hear the epiano, ducking as it should to drums, but I don't hear the drums themselves.

If I put a send on a drum bus to the epiano sidechain and I solo the epiano, the drum bus is still sent to the epiano's compressor sidechain.  So far so good.  But it's also still sent to the master bus.   The other buses and tracks go silent when I solo a track.  But not this one.

Note that I'm not soloing the bus.  I'm soloing a track, but the bus with the sidechain send keeps going out to the master too.

I hope that's clearer.  One workaround is to solo the track I want to hear, and then mute the drum bus so it doesn't also go out to the master.  But it's weird to have to do that.  Or maybe an aux track will behave better than a bus for this.

[A Tolerable Quietude]

9 hours ago, David Baay said:

If you aren't going to use the Output of that bus for anything, you can just make the Send prefader, and pull the volume down. But a better solution may be send the drums to an Aux track, and Output that track to the sidechain. 

 

Yes David, thanks.  Indeed, that's exactly what I do if I'm not using the output of that bus or track in the final mix, but only using it for the sidechain.  That can be a great technique to add some dynamic texture to a track!

But that's not what I'm talking about here.  The drum bus output will still be in the final mix, but I'm talking about soloing tracks briefly while I'm putting the song together, so I can check what a single track sounds like on its own.

When I solo a track briefly while I'm working on a project to hear that track in isolation, the other tracks respect that solo and stop going out to the master.  The buses also respect that solo and stop going out to the master.  If a track has a send on it to a sidechain compressor, it still respects the solo and stops going out to the master (even though it still goes out the send).  But for some reason a bus with a send to a sidechain compressor doesn't respect the solo, and it keeps going out to the master too.

[David Baay]

As I said, it's not the buses that respect the solo, it's just the tracks; all buses remain active, they just aren't getting any signal from the non-soloed tracks that route to them. There's no way for CbB to be sending  from the drum tracks to the bus that's sending to the sidechain input, and not have the signal also go to the output of that bus. (except, as I originally suggested, by using a prefader send to the sidechain and pulling the output volume down to -INF).

Using a send to an Aux track that dead ends into the sidechain with no alternate path to Main Outs or sending both tracks directly to the side chain as Steve and Noel suggested will do the trick. And you can still have the drums output to a drum bus that outputs to Master. CbB is smart enough to keep only sends from the drum tracks to the sidchain active while the outputs  (and sends to other buses like Reverb) are suppressed by the solo on the other track.

 

Edited October 8, 2022 by David Baay

[Noel Borthwick]

Yes, I just tried your project. As David mentioned, this is how the internal mechanics of bus solo works rather than a bug. It's incredibly complex to determine the dependencies that need to be activated when soloing something due to speghetti routing via sends and aux tracks etc.

What happens is because the drum bus is sending to the sidechain input (which is actually a hidden bus internally) the drum bus gets activated as well. You could argue that it's a shortcoming of the intelligence of the bus solo mechanism, but it's not necessarily as simple as that. For example, the output of the drum bus might be indirectly feeding another sidechain of the track in which case there is no recourse but to output from the bus.

In general, when it's determined that a bus is required for a sidechain the ENTIRE bus gets activated currently. If you need the bus output to be silent when soloing the track, set up the routing differently or mute the drum bus. The sidechain send will still be active in this case since its a pre-fader send. You can even use grouping to toggle the button states.

TLDR: Combining bus solo and track solo is very complex especially if you have intra bus routing like sidechaining. It works for 99% of use cases but is not perfect.

--

If you are interested, here is the net result of the solo states computation on my machine, after soloing the SI-Electric Piano 1 instrument track.
The [x] means an output is active. You can see that the algorithm enabled both outputs on the drum bus (out 1 is the sidechain send)

[x] 2   Master bus '--- None ---'
    [x] Out 0

[x] 92   Normal bus 'Master'
    [x] Out 0

[ ] 93   Normal bus 'Preview'
    [x] Out 0

[ ] 94   Normal bus 'Metronome'
    [x] Out 0

[ ] 110  <M> Track bus 'Matrix Data Track'
    [ ] Out 0

[x] 135   Master bus 'Focusrite USB ASIO: Output 1 + Output 2'
    [x] Out 0

[ ] 150   Master bus 'Focusrite USB ASIO: Output 3 + Output 4'
    [x] Out 0

[ ] 154   Master bus 'Focusrite USB ASIO: Output 5 + Output 6'
    [x] Out 0

[x] 156   Track bus 'LRS track bus'
    [x] Out 0

[x] 158 S  Track bus 'SI-Electric Piano 1'
    [x] Out 0

[x] 159 S  Track bus 'SI-Electric Piano 1'
    [x] Out 0

[ ] 160   Track bus 'SI-Drum Kit 1'
    [x] Out 0

[ ] 161  <M> Track bus 'SI-Drum Kit 1'
    [ ] Out 0

[x] 163 S  Track bus 'Sonitus:fx Compressor(Side Input)'
    [x] Out 0

[ ] 164   Normal bus 'Drum Bus'
    [x] Out 0
    [x] Out 1

[ ] 2047  <M> Track bus 'Track 6'
    [ ] Out 0
 

[A Tolerable Quietude]

Thanks so much for the very detailed reply and info.  Very helpful!  I would have thought it would be easier to get this kind of behavior from buses, but I guess not.

At the end of the day there's an easy workaround--just mute the bus when I want the track to solo properly.  I'm alsoglad that I didn't accidentally mess up a setting somewhere!

Thanks again!