Some consoles have only a few, some have a bunch. How many auxes do you guys generally use on a mix? What style of music? For the guys who are using something like 8-9 auxes on a mix, what are they all generally going to? Furthermore, how have you guys gotten around working on a console that doesn't have enough auxes for what you'd like to do? And to sum it up, if you were buying a console today what is the minimum number of auxes you would be comfortable with it having?
Well I'll jump in so you have at least one response. If you need to ask about aux's, you probably don't have enough outboard to really need many aux's... You can use them for parallel to give yourself a dry and wet versioin to blend -- take the aux. output to a piece of outboard gear and bring it back on , or you can use them to buss groups of tracks if you want, though in this case you'd want it post-fader and not pre (effects inserted should be pre) and you also use them to set up cue/headphone/ other mixes.
The more auxes you have the better it is, at least in my world. I have only four on my mixer . Like typed above it's a cool way for parallel processing.
An example that may not so well known... a 2 buss compressor on aux: say you have a song with a very big dynamic range and you wanna glue also some instruments on quieter part which is not so easy on the stereo buss... just send them via aux to the comp. When the louder instrument chime in, glue all together via a second 2 buss comp on the stereobuss.