Richard,
 
Sounds like you figured it out, but here's what I do (this comes from years of working on an analog mixer. Not to say it's the only way, but it's what works for me):
 
If you want to group tracks, ie to have a single fader control, send the track output to a bus and label it accordingly (vocal tracks go to the vocal buss). 
 
If you're feeding a track to a buss that contains FX like reverb, use that track's aux send so you can vary the amount of signal sent to the FX.  
 
Depending on the tracks in any given song, I've used as many as 30 busses. Anytime I have multiples of the same source (lead vocals, snare drum, etc), I send them to a buss. This allows the use of a single fader, plus I can apply EQ, compression, etc there as opposed to applying the same on multiple tracks. I'll also feed one buss to another buss. If I have a snare drum buss, a tom buss and a room mic buss, I'll seed these to a drum buss, which is then fed to an instrument buss. If I have (which I normally do) multiple FX busses, they all get fed to a master FX buss, which enables me to mute (for example) all FX with one button, if I need to do so during a mix.
 
Hope that's more helpful than confusing.