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[Samuel Rees]

Had a great run of gigs this weekend. Provided console, mics, stands, snake,  and myself for two nights at a venue whose regular staff and that gear was out at a festival. Carried enough for good pay, but little enough for an easy load in. Great bands too. Big ol McCauley rig, perhaps 20 years old.

Used my Si Compact pretty heavily - 12 buses, 2 matrices, 24 inputs. Thought I'd take a post to talk about what I did, see if other Si users are doing similar things or if you'd have done it differently.

5 pre-fade buses for monitors, one for aux-fed subs, 3 stereo post fade buses for subgroups - drums, lead vocals, background vocals. I did this by un-assigning those channels from the LR, sending those channels to the post-fade stereo buses, and assigning those buses to the LR. The two matrices were stereo front fills with only the vocal buses sent to them.

I did this so I could have all my vocal compression done at the group level as I was doing monitors from FOH, and so that I could send vocals only to the fills. I was also able delay the mains subs, and front fills separately all from the desk which was great because it was aligned a bit weird. I would just fly to the vocal bus sends-on-fader to see and edit my vocal compression, or sit on the bus master page.

Anybody else use buses as subgroups  on Soundcraft Si desks? Its a bit weird because there are not traditional subgroups. What do you put in your front fills?

[Jason Lucas]

That's how I have to do subgroups on the Roland M-400 too, post fade AUXes with the inputs unassigned from LR.

Problem is this board doesn't have bus compressors, so it makes subgroups pretty pointless.

[Samuel Rees]

That's how I have to do subgroups on the Roland M-400 too, post fade AUXes with the inputs unassigned from LR.

Problem is this board doesn't have bus compressors, so it makes subgroups pretty pointless.

Wow that sorta blows!

[Mac Kerr]

Problem is this board doesn't have bus compressors, so it makes subgroups pretty pointless.

Cause the only thing you would ever use subgroups for is bus compression. In a digital console that has compressors on every input. 

Mac

[Greg_Cameron]

Cause the only thing you would ever use subgroups for is bus compression. In a digital console that has compressors on every input. 

For the workflow I use, I like to have compressors both places for things like vocals and guitars where I'm doing mild compression on the channel strips and then using bus compression more as a limiter. Can't we just have it all, all the time Mac?

[Tommy Peel]

I run 6 channels of compression on individual channels on my analog board; so far I haven't seen a need to run bus compression(which isn't easy on my mixer as it lacks bus inserts). I run 3chs on vocals, 1 on acoustic, 1 on bass, and one on kick; it works well and I'm almost never wishing for more comps although if they were there I'd probably find a use for them. If I add any more rack gear it'll probably be a quad gate for the drums, but that won't be necessary unless we start playing venues where the drum mics are used for more than recording.

[Keith Erickson]

For the workflow I use, I like to have compressors both places for things like vocals and guitars where I'm doing mild compression on the channel strips and then using bus compression more as a limiter. Can't we just have it all, all the time Mac?

While it is true that the Soundcraft Si Compact, Expression, and Performer consoles do not have dedicated "Sub Groups" it does give you an easy way to use the aux's as such. 

We all get that a Sub Group and a Post Fade aux set to unity gain are effectively the same thing. So by using a post fade aux and sending the channel send level to that post fade aux at unity you get the same performance as a sub group.  There is however a trick to make it work more like having a "push to assign" button for the sub groups.

Select your Post Fade Aux of choice and go to the sends on faders mode like you always would.

Hold down the ALT button on the right side of the console and hit the ON buttons for the channels you want to go to that "Sub Group"  the channels will jump to a unity send level for that aux.

[Jason Lucas]

Cause the only thing you would ever use subgroups for is bus compression. In a digital console that has compressors on every input. 

Mac

Well, at least for me that's the main reason I'd use them.

[Greg_Cameron]

There is however a trick to make it work more like having a "push to assign" button for the sub groups.

Select your Post Fade Aux of choice and go to the sends on faders mode like you always would.

Hold down the ALT button on the right side of the console and hit the ON buttons for the channels you want to go to that "Sub Group"  the channels will jump to a unity send level for that aux.

Hmm, I wonder if there's a similar trick for the Avid Venue when in "24 bus" mode where the "subgroups" are the same type of assigned bus. Currently I have to dial up the sends to unity manually on channels I want to assign to my virtual subgroups. I have a feature request in to be able to use the regular bus assign buttons to set the encoders to unity on the matching sends.

[Chuck Simon]

It seems to me that the only reason to use bus compression is because you don't have enough compressors to compress channels individually as you should.  Why would you want a peak in one channel of a bus to compress all the channels in that bus?  With compression on every channel, you don't need bus compression.

[ProSoundWeb Community]