 So here we are in Cakewalk with a very typical setup. With this blue channel over here I have an acoustic guitar track. It could be anything. And over on this green bus over here I have inserted a reverb effect. Okay so anything I send to that bus is going to have that reverb applied. Let's do that now. I'll go over to my acoustic guitar channel. I'll click on the plus symbol next to sends and I'll select that bus reverb. Okay now let me know in the comments down below if you've ever done this and you've noticed this button here. It's labeled post and it's currently switched on and you've switched it off and on and haven't really heard a difference so therefore haven't used this feature. Hi folks I'm Mike and I hope you're well. You know mixing is partially about problem solving and it's amazing how often the solution involves using a bus but how we send our signal to that bus can make a big difference to the outcome. That's why in today's video we're going to be learning about post sends, pre sends and when to use them. Okay so back to our original example that we were looking at in the intro. I've got my acoustic guitar channel over here with this send across to this green channel which has a reverb plugin inserted. So I'm going to hear guitar with some reverb. Before we listen to that let's just switch that send off so we can hear how that acoustic guitar sounds without the reverb. Okay now let's switch it on and hear it with the reverb. Okay right away we can probably hear that there's way too much reverb for most circumstances. Now there's a couple of different ways we can control the level of the reverb here. First of all we could go to the reverb bus itself and just use the fader and turn it down so you could start off with it all the way at the bottom and then gradually push it up until it sounds right to you. It sounds like this. Now that method is okay if you're just using sort of one instrument like this and it's using one bus for reverb but if you've got several instruments or channels going to that bus you may want to control individual levels of reverb for each channel. So what we're going to do is go back to the fader and then just double click on it to reset it and this time we're actually going to use the level control over here right next to the sense. I'll turn that all the way down. I'll play the track and then I'll gradually turn it up until I'm happy with the result. Okay that sounds about right to me. Now an interesting thing happens when we use the fader for this guitar. Let's imagine it was fading out at the end of a track or perhaps just you know dipping down lower during the middle of a track. Have a listen and see what we hear. So we hear the guitar fade out but we also hear the reverb fade out in unison. Yeah they kind of keep their balance with each other and it all sort of disappears naturally there and that's because we have this button switched on this post button that we were talking about. Now what I want you to remember is that the word post also means after. So when we say post fader which is what this is labelling we're actually meaning after fader meaning the signal which is being sent to the bus is being affected by the level of the fader. Okay so less fader less signal being sent to the bus so in this case less reverb. That's quite handy because then when we want to sort of adjust the volume of our guitar in this case we're also automatically adjusting the volume of the reverb as well. So that's the function at the moment of this post button being switched on and it's switched on by default because that's the most common usage. However we don't always want it to behave in that way. So in this example we're using our send for a different reason and you'll see over here with the acoustic guitar we're now sending our signal to a different bus it's called compressor. That's all the way over here it's the purple one and this bus has a compressor on it the FET 76. Now I'm going to be doing something which is called parallel compression that's simply where you have your original guitar signal and then you do a send to a bus with a compressor on it and you have that signal highly compressed okay very very highly compressed and then you just blend the two together okay and that's why you'll notice with this mix at the moment I actually have the fader for the compressor bus down pretty low here okay because normally with parallel compression you're going to want that highly compressed guitar just to be quite a lot lower than the regular signal for the guitar or whatever instrument it is your parallel compressing. Now currently I have that post button switched on as it was before. Now I want you to watch the needle over here on this compressor as I push the fader down okay now with more compression that needle is going to be going all the way over to the left okay you'll see that as soon as I play the guitar it will go all the way over to the left then see what happens as I turn that fader down okay so it's highly compressing it is going down look at that needle and as we get all the way down to the bottom we can see there is no compression happening at all why because we have this set to post fader then less and less signal is being sent to that compressor okay so it's not needing to work because it isn't getting the signal that it needs to really kick in. Now in most cases with something like parallel compression that is not ideal at all we actually want to still have that highly compressed guitar but we just want its volume to go down lower okay so of course as you've probably guessed we need to flick this switch we need to turn the post fader sorry the post fader send off okay so we'll switch it off now we have what's called a pre fader send okay now pre means before yeah so the signal is being sent across to this compressor before it's being affected by the fader at all okay so as you're probably going to guess is as I bring this fader down now that needle is not really going to change over here it's still going to highly compress that guitar okay so let's do that and see how it actually sounds faders going down still lots of compression okay now that fader is all the way down but you'll notice we're still hearing the guitar why because we're actually now hearing only the compressed guitar over here now this can be a little bit problematic of course we are having the effect that we wanted in the sense that we're getting that guitar to be compressed regardless of its volume as its output volume but we usually want those two now to work in unison so we solve that in the following way although at least I solve it in the following way I'm just going to reset that fader for the guitar and we're going to create a new bus okay so just drag this divider over I'm just going to insert a stereo bus here doesn't matter what we call it we can just call it G bus a guitar bus that's fine now at the bottom of the guitar channel okay well we have our output drop down it's currently set to master which means the guitar is just going straight out to the master fade or the master bus okay so I'm going to change that and redirect it to G bus which is that new bus we created also for the compressor over here the guitar compressor in purple I'm going to do the same go to its output and have it go to G bus now what's happening is those two blended signals which are kind of got a balance with each other at the moment the original guitar and the compressed guitar and now both going to this new fader now when I bring this fader down then we get the expected result we're still getting the original guitar we're still getting a highly compressed guitar blended in with it but now when we use our fader for automation or what have you we get what we would kind of expect to happen they both blend out together so when should you use post fader sends and when should use pre fader sends well certain effects are going to have their character change depending on the amount of level or signal they receive okay the example we used earlier was a compressor okay so it's going to actually kick in with more signal being sent to it another example of that would be saturation plugins normally they're going to need to reach a certain level before they actually start to add saturation fall below a certain level and they're really not doing much so in those cases I would always use a pre fader send so that I can maintain a consistent level going through to those buses with those effects on in most other cases when I'm using stuff like reverb or delay or EQ then a post fader send is just fine it's simple to use there's no fussing around with extra buses and it's going to do the trick for you now buses are not the only type of channel that you can send signals to in cakewalk if you want to find out about all of your options in terms of routing in cakewalk by bandlab check out this video here we're going to run through all of that and that's going to help you find better solutions for the problems that you face in your mixes