Setting up a master bus

How do you route all of your buses and auxes through a master bus?  I see where I can designate a bus as default, but what else do I have to do to get the other buses and auxes through it?

Thanks in advance.

Any other creative bus routing things you guys use on a regular basis?

I typically route tracks to busses ie: kick, snare, hh, to "drum bus" - guitar tracks to "guitar bus" - vocals to "vocal bus" etc.  I then route those busses to the "master bus".  That way I can adjust an overall level or apply an effect or EQ to just that section of instruments.  There are some individual tracks that I might then route directly to the "master bus" if they stand alone.

Thanks guys, it's a great feature.  I longed for this feature back when I was using Sonar 2 (but I was too cheap to do anything about it). 

Hey while we're on the subject of busses can someone walk me through setting up an fx send? Is it signal to fx buss to output or is it signal to fx buss then back to signal?

Thanks it made more sense while I was typing it 

Correct me if I'm wrong. I have tried the method Bret, ASG and MJ all mentioned before but found it rather inconvenient. Because, for example, if you want to apply the same delay (same plugin, same delay time, same feedback amount, etc.) to both the lead vocal and the lead guitar (but not to background vocals and rhythm guitars), you'll have to create two effect buses and insert exactly the same delay plug with the same settings to each of the buses, and then route one of them to the vocal bus and the other to the guitar bus, because if you route them to the master bus, the balance between the dry sound and the wet sound won't be the same when you adjust the volume faders of the lead vocal/guitar tracks. Does this make sense?

So, if you want to apply effect to the whole set of instruments (e.g. compressor, eq, saturation, etc. to the whole drum kit), you should definitely create a bus for that purpose. But if you just think it would be convenient to adjust the volumes of multiple instruments with a single fader, I suggest a better way, which is simply grouping all volume faders of tracks of the same instruments (group all volume faders of all guitar tracks, for example). This grouping feature isn't available in all daws, so why not take the advantage? You can avoid creating unnecessary buses this way.

Bristol_Jonesey

Correct me if I'm wrong. I have tried the method Bret, ASG and MJ all mentioned before but found it rather inconvenient. Because, for example, if you want to apply the same delay (same plugin, same delay time, same feedback amount, etc.) to both the lead vocal and the lead guitar (but not to background vocals and rhythm guitars), you'll have to create two effect buses and insert exactly the same delay plug with the same settings to each of the buses, and then route one of them to the vocal bus and the other to the guitar bus, because if you route them to the master bus, the balance between the dry sound and the wet sound won't be the same when you adjust the volume faders of the lead vocal/guitar tracks. Does this make sense?

No. This is why you have a dedicated send level on each of your track inserts. You control the wet mix of the effect for each track that's sending to it via the send fader. You control the dry mix via track faders.

I'm a bit confused. Does it mean that I need to link the send fader and the track fader and control them both at the same time if I want to maintain the dry/mix balance while adjusting the volume level?

Bristol_Jonesey

Again, I disagree with this approach. It's usually far more effective to control the dynamics of a drum kit via separate compressors for kick/snare/toms/OH etc. 
There's nothing to stop you applying another compressor on your drum bus to glue it all together but your first line of attack should be via track Fx inserts.

As a general rule, though bear in mind most can be broken (provided you know the rule) is to run Fx like Reverb/Delay via a send/return loop and to apply dynamics like compressors/gates etc via inserts.

Yes, yes, I know that. I didn't mean you don't need compressors for each drum. Also, the delay I was talking about is exactly what you're saying here, via a send/return loop.

That all sounds right to me. If you want the delay volume to be adjusted with the guitar buss, group the volume faders of the two busses or run the delay buss output into the guitar buss instead of the master or add the delay to the third guitar fx bin instead of a buss. If something else is going to the delay buss, group the effect send level from the third guitar track with the guitar buss volume.

Yes, grouping together the track faders can easily work in this situation, it becomes a bit of a pain if any of them have their volumes automated, but there are workarounds.

Jlien X

Bristol_Jonesey


No.

Assuming you're running your Fx chain post fader, the level of the amount that's sent to your Fx bus will fade up/down as you adjust the level of the track fader.

Running them pre-fader is a different animal, and should only be used in special circumstances whehn you don't want the Fx to be faded out along with the dry track

I hope I'm wrong here, but I did a little test now.


I create three guitar tracks and routed them to a guitar buss. Then I created an FX bus with a delay plugin and changed the bus name to "Delay". This FX bus's output is Master.
Because I only want to apply delay to the third guitar (which is the lead guitar), I select "Delay" from the effect send pull-down.
I play back the track and I can hear the delay on the third guitar only. Good.
Then, if I want to change the overall guitar level (three guitar tracks) at once, what do I do? I adjust the volume fader of the Guitar bus.
And, even though I moved the volume fader to 0 (which means I don't hear any of the guitar tracks), I can still hear the delayed guitar because it's not the volume fader of the third guitar track that I'm controlling.

Couldn't you just route the "Guitars Bus" and the "Gtr FX Send Bus" to a new intermediary bus called "Guitars plus FX bus", and than route only that tot the master?  Then you can lower the volume of this new bus to affect all the three guitars, including the FX level that is only being applied to the one guitar.  And you'd still have the ability to adjust the FX level only and the gtrs level only.


I often have these separate busses which group to an intermediate bus as part of a general template for most of my projects.  Even if I don't always use them this way (thereby inducing a bit of redundancy in some projects), I like that all my projects are consistent and that I can easily use those intermediate busses should the occasion arise.


HTH

scook


Rather than grouping track volumes, I would always use a buss. That would give me the ability to adjust the tracks separately. But the software that I use does not have a limit on the number of busses, plugins or sends per project. Working with those constraints would radically alter my workflow.

It's not the limit on the number of buses that led me to use this approach, I'll surely upgrade to a higher version if I feel the limitation. My policy is "Don't do/get what's unnecessary because you'll have less time on what you really want to do," and I suggested the fader grouping approach because there might be users like me who are busy writing songs and practicing instruments and prefer to spend less time on tweaking effect parameters and dealing with many buses.

To give you (not particularly you scook) a better example, you might want to use only one instance each of three reverbs (e.g. room, plate and spring reverbs), two delays (short and long delays) and one chorus plugin to make the setup simple, and want to apply them to different tracks (room reverb to distortion guitar, organ and bass, plate reverb to lead guitar and some synths, and spring reverb to lead vocal and clean guitar, long delay to lead vocal and lead guitar, chorus to clean guitar and electric piano, etc.), this volume fader grouping approach can achieve it quite easily (and you can adjust the tracks' volume levels separately by holding Ctrl while tweaking the desired fader, which is why I said "why not take the advantage?").

I consider this approach more flexible, and the only bus I set up now is the drum bus (to apply saturation, mild, total compression, etc.). But what approach to use really depends on the user and the project, so just take this approach as one option that could be of help.
Isn't it nice that we use different approaches and can share them on this forum?

I would, however, upgrade to Producer and dive deeply into the sea of music production, creating tons of buses and loading tons of effects, IF I didn't have to do household chores and work more than 40 hours a week for a job that has nothing to do with music.