First off, welcome to the world of recording/engineering! And welcome to the forums, it's a great place, and I guarantee you'll learn a lot.
SeikoT123 wrote:(what's a "bus"?) and what various effects do (what's a "limiter," and how does it differ from a "compressor"?).
Buses are simply signal routers, they're the "cables" you use to route the output of one track to the input of another. A basic mix setup is to route similar instrument tracks into a "subgroup" track (for instance, have a subgroup of all your drum tracks), which you can control and process together. In digital workstations, you call these "Aux" tracks, which you can create from the menubar. They contain no audio recording in of themselves, but are used to process incoming signals. In the drum kit analogy, you would have separate tracks for snare, kick, overheads, toms, etc. You would create a bus, and assign the output of all those audio tracks to that bus. Then you would create an aux track and assign the INPUT of it to the same bus... now you've successfully routed all the instruments to one aux subgroup. You can create buses right inside the input/output dropdown menu, but an even better way is to create them in the "bundles" window, and then you can rename them to something more descriptive (a total lifesaver).
Another thing you should be aware of is serial vs parallel signal flow. In parallel, a track's output is just bused into another track's (usually an aux) input, as in the drum subgroup analogy. In serial routing, a duplicate signal is "sent" off the side of a track to a different destination. This is most typically used for reverb. The most common and best reverb practice is to have a dedicated reverb aux track with a reverb plugin set to 100% wet. Instead of passing a track's main output to the reverb, you would use a "Send" from off the audio track to the reverb track. So you'll have the dry audio that's simply output to a subgroup or main out, and a side signal that goes through the reverb track. The output of the reverb track would be to the main out or a subgroup, and eventually mix back in with the dry signal. The advantage to this is that you can use one reverb plugin for many different tracks, by sending from each of them, instead of having to create multiple instances on each track. Another advantage is control: with a parallel reverb, you're beholden to the "wet/dry mix" setting, which will decrease the dry output as you introduce more reverb. But more often than not, you want to raise and lower the level of the reverb without changing the volume of the dry sound. If it's sent off the side, you can automate either the send output level, or the fader on the reverb aux track, and not worry about it interfering with the dry level. And finally, often times it's good to EQ a reverb, after and even sometimes before it hits the plugin. Reverb units often have simple EQ stages, but they're typically less user-friendly and less powerful than the average EQ plugin that you're used to using. With a separate reverb aux track, you can forget about the built-in amenities, and apply your own EQs, compressors, or other processes that you might want to be part of your reverb sound (I'm sometimes known to use distortion in a reverb channel to thicken up a sound).
As for Compressors/limiters/levelers. You are correct, they are all technically the same thing, but with different settings and purposes. But that's not particularly fair because even compressors are used for totally different tasks. And though limiters are most typically used for mastering purposes, some industrial limiters and sought after for their performance as compressors. Limiters are compressors with an extremely high compression ratio, so that when a signal hits the threshold, it can't increase any further. These are referred to as "brick wall" limiters, and are commonly found at the end of a mastering chain. They're not as well suited for mixing because they can easily destroy the natural flow of an individual track because of their extreme signal-processing quality. For a more transparent sound, you would typically use a standard compressor with a lower ratio (1.5 - 6, or something in that range), and give it some attack time to allow for attack transients to still punch through. The term "leveler" is basically synonymous with compressor, just being more descriptive of its function. Often levelers use multiple parallel compressors, or non-parametric compression techniques (such as photosynthetic cells... the MasterWorks Leveler simulates this) to achieve smooth exponential compression. Don't quote me on this, because I don't even think there's an exact standardization of terminology between "compressor" and "leveler", but from my experience, this seems to be the only common difference. Levelers tend to have more going on under the hood, and less specific control for the user, so different levelers are sought after for different purposes. But many things called "compressors" also fall under this definition, so the line is blurry.
SeikoT123 wrote:I am discovering as I work with DP8 that there seems to be an assumption (probably accurate) that most users already have familiarity with recording fundamentals.
I think this is basically due to the fact that DP is a lesser-known, but older DAW. It's found its biggest niche among film and television composers, and is common around Hollywood. Unlike DigitDesign (now Avid), MOTU didn't do an aggressive push of massive hardware/software packages for recording studios. Its used a lot more by composers, artists, and bands. But the reasons for that are largely due to marketing and history. All professional DAWs basically can functional admirably in many different situations. Because of its niche audience, it's often not the first DAW that a users has used (for me, it's the third, actually, I came way of Sonar and Pro Tools), it's fairly common for someone who is a long time user of another DAW to fall in love with the workflow enhancements of DP. So yes, it tends to attract a more seasoned audience.
