Deriving a pre FX send

[norfolkmastering]

I want to derive a pre FX track send, so clean audio to send out to an analogue effects bus.

Is there any way to do this without having to start duplicating tracks?

I thought I could use an external insert with just the send allocated to a port but it doesn't work.

All suggestions welcomed!

[Lord Tim]

You could do this by setting the track output to an Aux track and putting your effects on the Aux track, but setting up sends on your source audio track. It still requires 2 tracks, but at least you don't have to duplicate the audio or any work you do on it.

So you'd do it like this:

1. On your source audio track, set the Output of that track to go to a New Aux track.
2. On your source audio track, insert a Send to your hardware outputs that feed your analogue effects
3. On the Aux track, load in all of your plugins that you want to your FX Bin.
4. Set the Output of your Aux track to wherever you want the mix to go next (eg: Master bus)
5. And then if you want your analogue effects to come back in as well, you'd need to set up a track with its Input set to the analogue effects output, and enable Input Echo to listen to that in realtime (which I probably wouldn't recommend because of latency sync)

If you want to get a little more fancy with playing back live analogue effects and have this in time, you'd want to use the External Insert plugin and set these tracks up a little differently.

Here's the signal path: http://static.cakewalk.com/documentation/SONAR/EN/images/Mixing.07.1.png

So all of the sends come after the FX Bin, which means this can't be done currently on a single track.

The best thing is that after you have this set up once, there's no reason you couldn't save this as a Track Template and drop it in whenever you need to do this kind of routing. It'd be about as quick as just inserting a single track in the end.

 

[John Vere]

That’s one I never thought of.

Heres another option that I have used for including my Lexicon mx 200 in a mix on vocals. 
I basically have to record it to new audio track. 
I solo the vocal bus and change the output to 3/4 which are  connected to the Lexicon inputs.
If you don’t want any effects bypass the pro channel and the effects bin of the source tracks and bus. But I want the EQ and compressors on for this. 

I create a new stereo audio track and I use 3/4  as the input to the new track. I set the Lexicon 100% wet and play and record the output in real time. 

Using my interfaces direct monitoring I can easily preview what I’ll get and make adjustments on the fly. 

The Lexicon track goes to the vocal bus. 
Now I just adjust and mix in that track to taste. 

It use to work via USB on Windows XP but they never updated the driver. 

 

[norfolkmastering]

Thanks for the suggestions which are really helpful