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I've been looking at this for ages and I can't find a definite answer but it's really annoying me:

As a physical set-up, usually analogue, I like to have two delays, the wet output of one delay feeding the input of the next so just the delay of the first delay is delayed on the second delay (production tongue twister just invented). The original signal is separate from the second delay. I also like to add effects to the wet output of the delay like chorus, ring mod, again separate from the original signal.

How can this be done in a DAW? As a physical, analogue cable-based system, I have two signals routed. When it's digital though, you just have the extra one channel as a send/return for wet/dry balance and no way of separating that wet output for extra treatment. I can't seem to prevent it from delaying the original input twice.

Am I just stupid or is this an actual limitation of DAWs?

Have 2 completely wet delays on 2 seperate sends and have a third send without an effect on it.
Route the dry signal to one of the delays and the dry send.
Route the delay the dry signal is fed into to the dry send and also to the second delay.

And use a delay plug with a 100% wet option.

Edit: if you don't get what I'm saying that this is alllll your fault for starting a thread like this imoooooo

I always forget how convoluted other DAWs' routing is from using Reaper so long.

So you've got your source track, hit ctrl-T twice, drag the I/O button from the source to the second track and then drag the I/O button of the second onto the third. (Usually I set these to prefader, post fx) Set up your delays at 100% wet on the two delay tracks. Then you just have to adjust the levels of each one. If you want to process all 3 or control them all with one fader, create a new track to act as a folder and drag the other 3 under it.

Boom cakesauce.

Reaper doesn't fuck around with aux tracks or midi tracks or audio tracks or whatever. Tracks are tracks, do whatever the fuck you want with them. There's no busses, you just send directly from one track to another. Trying to emulate a hardware mixer always seemed so convoluted to me. Why should I have to remember what buss is going to my delay send and what buss returns, blah blah. Just send shit to your delay track and get on with it.

So that means if you mute the sending track and turn off the delays on the channels you've routed it too, you won't be able to hear any of the original signal from the sends?

What happened before in Ableton, which incidentally is why I will never bother using it again for general production, is that, even if the original track is muted and the effects on the sends are off, the original sound still gets through on the effects channels by the amount it was send by. So that meant if I put the send to 100% wet and turned the effect off, it was just as loud as not sending it, which is fucking annoying enough for me to not want to bother starting.

I like to treat wet and dry as separate, distinct signals.

Well yeah if you mute the original track you won't hear shit. If you wanna hear only the delay sends you just make sure it's a pre-fader send and then pull the fader down. Or route the dry track so it has to go through another track and then mute that.

You can mute the sending to a track as well, so if you have some reverb track for instance with a bunch of shit routed to it, but only want to hear the wet reverb affecting the snare, you can mute all the other receives on the track except the one from the snare track and have the reverb track solo'd.