Track Stack names and Bus numbers

[Infirium]

Hey everyone,

 

I don't think there's any way to change this in settings since I've looked all over, but maybe someone has a handy little workaround:

So whenever you create a track stack, you can give it a name that appears in the arrangement view and the mixer and said stack will have a Bus as the input with a number, all very logical.

But when you go to the Side Chain dropdown tab in any plugin and go to set a Bus as your Side Chain input you are presented with a list of Bus 1, 2 etc.. followed by a slew of track names that are routed to that bus (or inside that Track Stack, depending on how you look at it) and those track names appear to be in random order that don't align with the ascending or descending order of the Track Stacks they are in and nowhere in that list is the Track Stack name to be found.

So once you've got a bigger project with a bunch of Track Stacks and nested Track Stacks inside of those and you're working in the arrangement view where you're just seeing your well organised Track Stack names and you quickly want to Side Chain something to your Drum stack, you either have to decipher whatever track names are listed and remember that those relate to the Drum stack, or you have to click the Drum stack in the arrangement view to look at what bus number it has.

It would be so much nicer if inside the Side Chain dropdown in Plugins you could just see: Bus 1 *Track Stack Name* <- *All the track names inside*, or something similar.. I'm not sure if there is some way to achieve something like this? It would drastically improve workflow.

 

Cheers 😄

[David Nahmani]

If a track stack uses for example Bus 17 for its routing, and you're using Bus 17 as the side chain input of a plug-in, then you're not really using the track stack itself as the side chain, you're using Bus 17 which is the input of the main track of the track stack. 

Let's say you have 3 kicks stacked in a summing stack that uses Bus 17, and you use a compressor and an EQ on the main track of the track stack. Bus 17 is the signal at the input of the main track, before it's processed by the compressor and EQ. 

If you want the output of the track stack as the side chain input, you need to route the output of the main track of the track stack, or send it, to a new bus, say Bus 18, and use Bus 18 as the input of the side chain of your plug-in. Make sure you delete the Aux that Logic automatically creates that would route Bus 18 to your Stereo Out. Now you'll see Bus 18 <— * Track Stack Name * like this:

This would be easier if we could use Aux channel strips as side chain inputs in plug-ins, but that's not currently possible in Logic Pro. 

[Infirium]

Hi David, thanks for the reply! 😄

Yes, understand how the routing works and how the busses relate to the track stacks. My question was purely about the (imo) cumbersome way things are labeled.

Your example above is very clear, bus "17 <- sub kick, hard kick, boom" (and I'm well aware that my personal workflow may just not lend itself well to this) that way it's very easy to determine which stack bus 17 relates to. But when I start organising my projects after the first initial "creative flow" I start putting everything in track stacks, but for example, inside my Drum stack, there might be a bunch of tracks that have clear names like "kick" sub" etc.. but there's also a bunch of tracks usually that are for later use and they might just have *insert random sample pack name sample* still and that + the fact that the track names in the side chain dropdown are not in any particular order, I might just end up having "bus 1 to 17 <- *random sample names*" that make it hard to figure out which bus I'm looking for if I want to side chain my Bass stack to my Drum stack without having to open the mixer, or go through the arrangement window to see which Bus my Bass stack is routed to. 

So to avoid any confusion, I wanted to know if there was a way to ensure that the clearly labeled track names would show up in the side chain dropdown first, like say, putting those tracks at the top or bottom of the track stack, but that seems to make no difference to how they show up in the dropdown. I'll add a quick screenshot as an example of how I'm seeing it most of the time and once you start adding AUX FX to into the equation it starts getting messy real quick, this is just a small project still:

[David Nahmani]

I understand.

However no matter how hard to decipher the source track names are, I used a new bus with the name of the stack, so that you can see the name of the stack in the side-chain pop-up menu. 

Here's a better example using hard to identify source track names. Here I have a bunch of source tracks named bh, bd, b3 etc... in a summing track stack that uses bus 1 and that is itself sending to bus 18. The "Kick stack" summing track stack is thus easily identified in the side chain pop-up menu: