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Logic Pro 9 Auxes, Busses and Outputs

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Roger Jackson

Logician
I am intrigued to know how other users arrange these items in their mixers.
L9 displays Outputs to the far right of the mixer, with busses to the left of them, and then Auxes in the order that they were created.

I frequently get pieces to mix from other studios with the Auxes in a fairly random order (I like to see my signal flow run left to right). Does anyone have a clever way to easily re-order these?

The methods that I have tried are:

Create Arrange track for each object and then Re-assign the track, so that the Auxes appear as if they were created in the correct order. (v. long-winded)
Create Arrange track for each object, pack them into a folder, put them in order, select "Arrange" on the mixer, then unlink it, and save the screenset. (Again hardly snappy)

Call me anal, but I think this sort of tidying-up helps good mixing, especially where you have lots of tracks.

Roger Jackson
Film Music
Oxford UK
 
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I always create arrange tracks out of them and sort the order so that it's for example,

all drum tracks then maybe the Drum verb.. Aux 01 (to which they are routed) Put a blank region on the Aux track so it doesn't get deleted when I hit 'delete unused tracks'.

then all bass type tracks to the next Aux, which is then placed next in the arrange track count etc etc....

Mind you, it does help to have a 30" monitor for this type of arrangement, but it works well for me.

I definitely agree that being tidy always assists in good mixing.. I was anal about live setups and cabling etc, so I am much more comfortable if my DAW if the desktop is tidy.
If you are consistent from job to job, it makes it really easy to import data from other sessions and observe what's going on in those great Logic 9 preview pdfs.
 
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What Matt said ...

I would only add, I try to avoid having any bus channel strips in a logic project these days. I make extensive use of Aux Channel Strips, but having been caught out the odd time by having a Bus Strip lurking in some lost corner of the Audio Environment, either with its fader set to something other than 0, or having some plugins inserted and routed somewhere I didn't want the signal to go to. Definitely a situation to avoid.

kind regards

Mark
 
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Yes Mark... those legacy buss objects are next to useless other than backward compatibility... so yes, I still like them 🙂

I don't have any (buss objects) in any of my templates any more and have more or less, fully adopted the Logic channel strip management these days. It's just easier.
Gone is the need for me to have a complex Environment anymore.. no Yammy digi mixers to control, or any other midi gear for that matter.

It's definitely easier and more creative these days and it's especially brought to mind when I have to import a job from many years ago.... which surprisingly is still even possible (albeit with an old machine converting to logic 6...to enable 9).

I digress, but I haven't tried opening a Logic 2 file for a while! 🙂
 
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I agree with Roger that the handling of aux faders in Logic's mixer is abysmal. It really gets unmanageable when you have to go into "All" view mode as opposed to "Arrange" view mode. Logic places the auxes in haphazard order pertaining to the order they were created in rather than their functions and what other channel strips they may be tied to. Throw some multi timbral / multi output software instruments into the mix that you may have created at different times in your project and it becomes completely unmanageable.

The solution - as has been pointed out - is to have Arrange tracks when necessary to force the mixer to display the order you want, and/or use folders. But if you are getting into complex set ups,going back to the Environment mixer and placing the objects manually often becomes the only workable solution - at least in my experience.
 
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Absolutely Eli,
Ultimately, it would be great if we could have a 'default' USER mixer config, instead of All, Global....etc etc.. This would reflect on control surfaces and make it a whole lot more manageable if just using the Mixer window below the Arrangement and negate the necessity to have those Auxes in the Arrange page (which I do like especially if automated in any way)
 
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mattrixx; Ultimately said:
Definitely! I try to achieve this with my template. FWIW:

Create 40 Auxes, configure 37-40 as the auxes I always need - Inst master, Vocal Master, Effects Master, Full Mix Master - along with say a dozen for effects, parallel compression etc. immediately below them. Then delete everything between 8 and 24, leaving me with sub groups on 1 - 8. Then as I mix, if I do need to create new Auxes, they will appear at nos.9, 10, 11...

The solution to my problem above might therefore be to import the data from the messy songs into this template. I am experimenting right now to see how to get the most important data across.

Roger Jackson
Film Music
Oxford UK
Click to expand...
 
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I think the ideal solution would be to allow us (the user) to be able to manually move and reposition aux tracks within the mixer. I know this goes counter to the whole notion of the track mixer - where it conforms automatically to mirroring the Arrange Window. But it would be a great solution. It's probably a difficult thing to program though.

Imagine a world where the track mixer mirrors the Arrange Window except for Auxes which you can freely position where you want from left to right! Paradise!!😀
 
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Eli said:
Imagine a world where the track mixer mirrors the Arrange Window except for Auxes which you can freely position where you want from left to right! Paradise!!😀
Click to expand...


Exactly what is required Eli! The mirroring is great for Arrange tracks, but just doesn't work for auxes where you need an immutable display of the subgroups and outputs. I don't know how the coding nuts and bolts work, but obviously the aux objects are flagged with their creation order number. If you could get access to that, then ordering them would again be simple.

As you said before, we could go back to the environment mixer, but the mixer has evolved further than its environment forebear, and we would lose several useful facilities like labelling, colouring, being able to move plug-ins...

Roger Jackson
Film Music
Oxford UK
 
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I'll digress again further...
You can't even select an AUX via the MCU/LogicControl if it's not in the Arrange window (if in the default Arrange view).
I have really tried to leave the environment window behind and adopt the 'all in one approach' and have adapted the tools and layouts for such. However, there are many little annoyances that prohibit this from being a seamless solution... for now.

Anyway... in saying all this, the state of Logic is far advanced than any other DAW that I 'have' to deal with at this time.
 
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Jay Asher said:
This is why some long time users still prefer to mix in Environment layers.
Click to expand...

Indeed. FWIW, I am happy enough to switch back and forth. In fact, I could still happily continue to work exclusively within the Audio Environment but for the fact that it isn't possible to move/copy Effects and Instruments as can be done in the Mixer.

Having 3 rows of Audio Channel strips in one environment layer on a 30" screen is enormously comfortable and offers a better overview of what is going on in reasonably large mixes than anything else I have come across.

kind regards

Mark
 
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I too still work mainly in the environment. To me this is where Logic excels, you can do everything in many ways and if you know the program well you can usually find a way to achieve whatever you're after.
The mixer page could do with a lot of improving no doubt about that but whether it's a problem or not, I don't know. The environment can do all of the re-arranging that was required in the beginning of this thread. One could argue that if the environment had the move/copy between strips the mixer page would be useless.
Of course having used Logic since version 2 it's hard for me to say whether I would do things differently if I had joined in after the mixer page was included (10 years ago or something like that).
 
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I've been getting used to the way the arrange, mixer, and aux tracks work. I had a lot of complaints about a month ago, but now I'm relying heavily on Color Coding Groups and sections, and when necessary Adding the Aux to the arrange and moving it to be part of that color coded group.

Many of my auxes I don't even add to the arrange any longer unless they need automation. When I select the track I rely on the inspector to show me the aux in question. I've just gotten used to it and have stopped being so anal about what is where as I've become so familiar with my template I know where to go. It's sort of freeing in a way. My template starts off with over 126 tracks of midi and audio and aux channels, and it's always the same so I know where it all is.

Familiarity, and color coding has been the best way to deal with it.

If something comes in from another studio, I treat it the same. Move tracks around so that I have clustered groups (drums, strings, brass etc.) and color code them.

One thing I try to avoid is the folders. Seems like when I have tried using them in the past, say for drums, it just makes seeing everything at once more complicated. What I'd like to know is how people are using the Pack into folder option. At what point do you do that and for what reasons?
 
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Back before there where take folders I used to use them for keeping different takes so it didn't fill up the arrange window. I have also, and probably still would but it doesn't happen much the days, used them for miditracks which were running on outboard midi. I´d record the tracks as audio but still keep the midi tracks just in case.
One has to remember that Logic is an old program and there are things in there that long time users have used since last millenium (myself included) which may or may not make sense anymore but to some it's very valuable.
 
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Eli said:
Imagine a world where the track mixer mirrors the Arrange Window except for Auxes which you can freely position where you want from left to right! Paradise!!😀
Click to expand...

I agree, that would be cool, but from a coding perspectives I can see two issues that might add complications: the mixer and arrange channel numbering would be different, and the behavior of mixer-only auxes would be different from arrange-auxes.

For example, lets say that you have two auxes. GTR AUX is on the Arrange at track 4. DRM AUX is not on the Arrange, only the Mixer (there is no "track mixer" anymore :tongue:). You move it to between track 8 and 9.

Problem one:
The Arrange now has the 9th channel listed as #9. It's default name is Audio 9. However, in the Mixer, Audio 9 is now on channel 10, because DRM AUX is now numbered 9 on the mixer. This isn't a major problem (indeed, I actually turn off the channel numbers because I find them confusing already!) but coding-wise, I could imagine the disconnect causing some issues.

Problem two:
Now lets say you add four new tracks after track 8 on the Arrange. What would happen to the Aux? Are the new tracks created before or after the non-Arrange aux? Again, it's not difficult from a user perspective to simply re-position DRM AUX if it gets moved out of place, but from an internal coding perspective, this might cause issues.

I don't see any of this as insurmountable, but it would make what might seem to us as a trivial feature to implement more difficult internally.

FWIW here's an easy way to make this issue a non-issue, at least for my workflow: in your default song/personal templates/autoload/whatever you want to call it, simply create as many auxes as you might conceivably need as subgroup masters (I usually do 12, although I never use that many), and add them all to the Arrange. That way, there are pre-created auxes ready and waiting to be shifted wherever you want.

Also FWIW, I never use the Environment Mixer, only the Mixer. 🙂 Not just for the moving around of plug-ins, but because I use external MIDI synths, and the Environment Mixer doesn't have MIDI channel strips!

Orren
 
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