User manual

16
VST Connections: Setting up input and output busses
The VST Connections window
You add and set up busses in the VST Connections win-
dow, opened from the Devices menu.
This window contains the following tabs:
• The Inputs and Outputs tabs are for viewing input busses or
output busses, respectively.
• The Group/FX tab allows you to create Group and FX chan-
nels/tracks and to make output assignments for these. See
“Setting up Group and FX channels” on page 20.
• The External FX tab (Cubase only) allows you to create effect
send/return busses for connecting external effects which can
then be selected via the effect pop-up menus from inside the
program. See “External instruments/effects (Cubase only)” on
page 20 and “Using external effects (Cubase only)” on page
163 for further information.
• The External Instruments tab (Cubase only) allows you to cre-
ate input/output busses for connecting external instruments.
See “External instruments/effects (Cubase only)” on page 20
and the chapter “VST Instruments and Instrument tracks” on
page 169 for further information.
• The Studio tab (Cubase only) is where you enable and config-
ure the Control Room. See the chapter “Control Room (Cu-
base only)” on page 135.
For the time being, we shall focus on how to set up input
and output busses.
Depending on which tab you have selected, Inputs or Out-
puts, the window lists the current input or output busses,
with the following columns:
Adding a bus
1. Click the Inputs or Outputs tab depending on which
you want to add.
2. Click the Add Bus button.
A dialog appears.
3. Select the desired (channel) configuration.
The pop-up menu contains Mono and Stereo options as well as several
surround formats (Cubase only). To select another surround format, use
the “More…” submenu.
• Alternatively you can right-click in the VST Connections
window and add a bus in the desired format directly from
the context menu.
The new bus appears with the ports visible.
4. Click in the Device Port column to select an input/out-
put port for a channel in the bus.
The pop-up menu that appears lists the ports with the names you have as-
signed in the Device Setup dialog. Repeat this for all channels in the bus.
Adding a child bus (Cubase only)
A surround bus is essentially a set of mono channels –
6 channels in the case of the 5.1 format. If you have a
mono track in the project, you can route it to a separate
speaker channel in the bus (or route it to the parent sur-
round bus and use the SurroundPanner to position it in the
surround image). But what if you have a stereo track that
you simply want to route to a stereo channel pair within the
bus (Left and Right or Left Surround and Right Surround
for example)? For this you need to create a child bus.
Column Description
Bus Name Lists the busses. You can select busses and rename
them by clicking on them in this column.
Speakers Indicates the speaker configuration (mono, stereo, sur-
round formats) of each bus.
Audio Device This shows the currently selected ASIO driver.
Device Port When you have “opened” a bus (by clicking its + button
in the Bus Name column) this column shows which phys-
ical inputs/outputs on your audio hardware are used by
the bus.
Click You can route the click to a specific output bus, regard-
less of the actual Control Room output, or indeed when
the Control Room is disabled.
Column Description