Pre-Fader and Post-Fader

General Discussion
21

Affecting the send track effects transparency-ratio.

22

This is why it got me. Anybody who has ever worked with physical desks will be used to setting the trim (pre-fader) once and not touching it, then maybe adjusting the channel (post) fader as a song is playing/throughout a gig. It’s Sound Engineering 101!

But I said I wasn’t going to get back into this yet again…

23

I’ve been stubbornly treating the mixer in that matter, using the pre fader as a trimer. No wonder my levels were confusing me.

24

Usually sends (or rather the returns) are 100% wet, no?

I guess people want wet dry levels to balance the fx with the mix? That’s no replacement for a fader with automation if you want to bus drums, for example.

25

I have to say I am also a bit confused about the mixer.
The first thing that caught my attention is that by default, opening the mixer will show the pre faders. That made me think that those are the intended places to make overall volume changes to the tracks, which would be weird. I always switch to post fader view then, but for some weird reason those seem to have a different scale (feels logarithmic or something, with most accuracy in a range that is only 6db or so and 5% of the scale affects everything else. As mentioned before, making the level audible lower means really putting it down, while making it really audible louder means inserting a gainer. (Why is this? Couldn’t the post fader have the same resolution/scale as the pre fader).

On the other hand, I think the design as it is makes sense (well, not for the sends, but for the rest):
Automating the pre fader is needed in order to be able to change the overall volume level of the automated volume (via the post fader). So for instance, if I automate a loud-quite-loud-quite kind of thing, then I can change the overall level, relative to loud a quite via the post fader. So the pre fader is more than just a trim. This is something I actually miss in other sequencers.

But to make a long post short, I have three questions:

  1. Is the pre fader really intended to be the place to do the normal loudness level mixing (because it shows by default in the mixer). And if so, why? What about compressors etc.?

  2. Why is the scale of the post fader different to the one of the pre mixer? And what exactly is the difference there? The scale in the GUI is the same!

  3. What is the intended way to deal with sends? As mentioned before, the original track’s post fader becomes useless when using a send. However, that could be solved easily by allowing to place effects (the send device in this case) behind the post fader.

fladd

26

This is what really makes me like the mixer. Set the pre to have a reasonable modulation, then compress, eq etc… The post volume with its more precise behavior is then perfect for small adjustments in the mix.
But the fact that the post faders are not automatable just doesn’t make any sense at all. I understand the post faders are made for small adjustments, but this makes them the perfect thing to automate on the final mix.