Separat solo bus

[Tor Gunnar Kjøllesdal]

I do not want solo to affect master channel, I want solo and monitoring on a different bus routed to another hardware output.

Is it possible to create a separate solo bus like this in Cakewalk?

[reginaldStjohn]

I would think you just could create another bus and then route that to the desired hardware output. However, I don't quite know what you mean when you say you don't want solo to affect the master channel. 

If you solo a track then that track will mute all other tracks.

[Lord Tim]

For clarifications sake, do you mean:

You would like 2 outputs: one for the master out, one for monitoring (eg: headphones)

You would like to be able to solo tracks but have it ONLY affect one of those outputs, so for example, all of the tracks routed to the monitoring bus, if you solo one of those tracks, it would only change the solo state on that bus, while leaving the master bus unaffected, and vice versa.

Is that correct?

[Glenn Stanton]

this is similar to this question on separating the monitoring volume from the master. @Lord Tim has it correct. also: 

 

 

[Lord Tim]

OK, I was having a bit of a think about this and here's a kind of workable solution, although it's a little backwards and a bit of work to set up. (Bear in mind I'm mid-massive project right now and my brain is fried, so no doubt someone will come along and go "dude, why did you go to all of that work when you could have just done....." and give a much more elegant solution 🤨)

So you set up your project like this:

Have all of your tracks together and the outputs going to the Master bus.

Create a second bus called Monitor. Both of these go to different hardware outputs, eg: main out, headphones.

For each of these tracks, add an Aux send, set it to PRE rather than POST.

Those Aux sends will essentially be copies of your tracks** (see note), and the output of those sends will go to the Monitor bus. It's probably easiest to put them all together in their respective folders, like in the screenshot. Since this is PRE fader, you can adjust the levels of the tracks and Aux tracks entirely independently, effectively creating a separate submix.

Now here's where it gets a bit backwards. If you solo something, it'll just mute everything else, so that's not real. But if you mute the Aux track group, and then selectively unmute the tracks you want to hear in the Monitor bus, it more or less does the same thing, but without muting anything else. You can select multiple tracks and hold down CTRL to quick group them, so you can toggle a bunch at a time, mimicking what Solo does to a degree.

** The big caveat here is that if you're running any effects sends or have any crazy routing, you need to take into consideration what the outputs of those sends are doing. Plus, if you solo any of the main tracks (not the Aux tracks) you're back at square one because that'll affect everything downstream from there, including the Aux track sends.

If you have a track template set up with all of this stuff already in there, it's going to save a lot of grunt work recreating things each time, and it's pretty flexible, but there's a lot of gotchas here. You'd have to really need this kind of routing to go through all of this trouble.

Definitely open to hearing any better suggestions from people, though!  

[Glenn Stanton]

i use tracks grouped into a buss - drums, acoustic guitars, electric guitars, pianos, synths, vocals, etc. these busses become my main mix, and then if something in the group needs to be tweaked at a track level, easy enough to adjust the balance within the buss grouping. for soloing then i just solo the buss, or the stem (low, drum, vox, instruments, solo), or worst case back to the individual track(s) - but usually i don't solo both a track and a buss since it can create weird routing situations.

e.g. drums buss + pdrums + kick feed into the drums stem. so if i'm going to tweak the drums parts (kick, snare, hh, toms etc) i'll solo the drums stem (a stereo buss feeding the master). all the vibes, reverbs, etc associated to the drums are there now. and i can solo the tracks or mute some to tweak the track levels. but i wouldn't try to solo the bass track or buss unless i soloed the low stem as well.

edit: one quick note -- you could do all this with aux tracks in lieu of busses. this is handy when you want to keep the group track next to the associated tracks. for example: you might create a "drums" aux track which has a mix of the drum parts, and perhaps more than one which has various tracks so you can set the levels via automation, and then these feed the drums "stem" buss (where you might do other processing) 

Edited February 21, 2023 by fossile