jpleong's Forum Page

From the Sweetwater website:
“VCA Group
A feature found on many high end live mixing boards. A VCA group provides the same type of control over signal levels that a mute group provides for muting. Basically, VCA groups allow the sound engineer to control the volumes of several independent sources through one control fader without having to route them all through a common subgroup. It is called a VCA group because Voltage Controlled Amplifiers are used. In fact every controllable channel in the desk has its volume controlled by a VCA (as opposed to audio passing through a resistive fader) in order for this to work. Some more modern (and expensive) designs have employed a motorized fader scheme (also known as Moving Fader), but these sometimes aren’t referred to as VCA groups since there may no longer VCA’s involved (see the Technical Tip of the Day from 04/09/2002 for more background on that).”

Since VCA, on a console, controls the fader and not the audio, things like post-Fade Auxes and Buss sends are affected proportionally as well. So, for example, as the level decreases so does its reverb send.

I think that Frits should take advantage of software and take the concept one step further and make the VCA function linkable to any other parameter on any other channel. These parameters could be setup to match the movement, move proportionally, or move completely opposite each other. With this, you can achieve stuff like switching between two takes very easily or activating an effect on another channel when the guitar is pulled down in the mix.

Good (original) suggestion, Blackstar! I hope you don’t mind if I steal it 🙂

JP

Add my voice, I suppose. Though, the auto-interface routing/naming issue is a bigger thing for me -since I use different devices depending on my location (home/office/mobile).

JP

I am a CM “convert.” I have been doing income earning work on Podium for the past few months.

JP

silly Americans, always demanding to have it their way. 😉

I only asked because it confused me on occasion (my Saab’s digital mileage markers are the same way). I don’t mean to force European users to have to adopt the American system -if we could specify location/region within Podium? No big deal if it’s more trouble than it’s worth.

JP

Oh, the issue in question is the Drum n Bass issue, since I just remembered that the UK issue is a month ahead of the US.

JP

Hey Frits, what kind of interfaces and setups do you test with?

And I’ll add my voice for re-Wire support.

JP

@Zynewave wrote:

So, given that a single track and the bus return section is soloed, what you want to achieve can be done by turning the gain dial to “off” on the bus send track?

I just tried this and it works. My only two issues are 1) what you describe in the question below and 2) the act of turning those gain dials to off -especially if they’ve already been adjusted to some level (got to remember where I set them or make yet another group track).

@Zynewave wrote:

Would there be a need to solo just a bus return, i.e. to hear the bus return for ALL tracks with their dry signal muted?

Yes. If I have a lot of things going to the same reverb, delay, chorus, etc… you get the picture. Then there’s always the fun listening-to-multiple-returns at the same time to see how they mix together.

JP

ps –

I’ve thought about implementing automatic soloing of bus return tracks

Oh, and don’t do this -it would drive me crazy. If you setup a song via template, for example, and there’s already a verb on a voice -soloing it to work on EQ would be difficult if the reverb return automatically soloed with it. Does that make sense? If I want to hear the return with the dry, I’ll just solo the return as well.