Hi, I was watching a video on fattening up tracks like say vocals by creating bus tracks and say sending the main vocal tracks to bus tracks where the bus tracks has effects.
The tutorial vid I was watching , the tech is using Pro-Tools and he was able to solo the bus tracks so he could only hear them so his blending of them with the main track can be compared.
How is that done with Ardour 4.6?
I other words, you didn’t hear the main vocal track, only the routed ones to the bus.
Have you looked at http://manual.ardour.org/mixing/muting-and-soloing/ which attempts to explain how soloing and muting work on Ardour?
Not that I’ve entirely got my head round it myself, but it’s a start. Also note that the manual on those pages is a work in progress and may not be up to date, and I think monitoring changed recently in Ardour. Good luck!
The gray-out means that you are not using a monitor section in this session, which makes Listen(ing) impossible. Session > Properties > Monitoring will allow you to add (and remove) a monitor section, and then Solo-is-Listen will be possible.
But … because of Ardour’s freeform routing, soloing a bus MUST imply soloing all tracks connected to the bus. Otherwise you would hear nothing. Ardour’s routing possibilities are a lot deeper than ProTools, which can be good for some things, but makes the solo model quite complex, and also creates a few limitations.
soloing a bus MUST imply soloing all tracks connected to the bus. Otherwise you would hear nothing
But if I route aux sends (post fader) from tracks to a reverb bus and solo the reverb I get nothing - the aux sends are apparently muted. Is there a way round that? Being able to listen to the reverb by itself would be useful. Maybe that will work too if I use a monitor section.
Just thought I could do that with Ardour.
But apparently you can, if you create a monitor section...
Note that I said “connected to the bus” … I didn’t specify what “connected” meant, since this isn’t a straightforward concept. A track/bus may be connected to another track/bus via its main outs, or via sends. When you solo a track/bus, we follow connections back upstream (towards the origin of the signal) and downstream (toward your audio interface), and implicitly solo everything in the signal path. But the signal path ignores sends, and only considers the main inputs and outputs of each track/bus. All tracks/busses that are not explicitly soloed (i.e. you clicked on the solo button), or implicitly soloed (i.e. connected to something that was explicitly soloed) are muted.
But … mutes in Ardour are also complex beasts, again to accomodate many different routing possibilities. If you right click on the mute button, you have four possible mute points that can be enabled or disabled. If enabled, then muting that track/bus will mute that particular “sub-path” out of the track/bus (e.g. post-fader, or main-outs).
So to do what is discussed, set the original tracks to NOT mute pre or post fader (depending on where you put the send). Then solo the bus they send to. The tracks will be muted (because they are not considered “connected” to the bus via the logic I described above). But the sends of the tracks will not be muted, and so will still reach the bus.
Thank you Paul. I knew Ardour would be able to do it, just didn’t know how!
I think I need to spend some time making a map of all the controls (right and left click on everything, list what comes up). I won’t have a very neat and useful map at the end of that, but I’ll learn a lot in the process…