Bus Mixing or ?

[Tom_Har]

Hello Guys

This will sound totaly newbie but can somebody explain me when i lets say wanna mix drums or instruments(EQ-ing, compression etc..) is it better way (right way) to make bus channel of drums or instruments and then mix over this bus channel or direct on there channel. Thank you so much.

[QVprod]

Depends on what you need to do in a mix. Adding fx to a bus is for when you want the entire drumkit affected, but if you want to eq or compress just certain instruments then you do those on individual channels. If you want to remove mud (unwanted low end) then do that on individual channels. Generally people use a combination of both (as needed) processing the individual drums as well as the drum bus.

[Tom_Har]

Thanks man

[Loque]

Using FX on a bus rather than individual tracks can save a lot of CPU and you need to do it only once. Eg putting everything together that should be "ducked" by a kick or having thw same reverb room...

[LABONERECORDINGS]

Having send fx can help make sounds 'fit' in a certain space more (Reason Essentials has 4 sends, Reason has 8 sends), so you could have say a plate reverb and a spacious reverb, add a touch to various channels and busses to give a bit more consistency.

Busses help because they are sort of like 'folders'... you can control the buss from one fader so as you say a drum kit you can control the overall level of all drums respectively, while still having the freedom to adjust the drum instruments on their own channels within that buss.

And yes FX on a buss can save DSP. Unless you're a DSP pusher who like to have a compressor or effect on every channel, that's the beauty of it, there's no hard and fast rules to this, only some guides and preferences. Sound designers may slap on effect after effect after effect on a channel and buss then they do a bounce down to audio, to capture their sound in one simple audio file and then throw that back through the process again. Drum and Bass artists are prolific at doing this (aka resampling) because it gives you your DSP back plus it makes you progress with your music instead of noodling for hours on a knob that's actually not part of the instrument / buss channel but giving you placebo for the past 20 mins lol

We prefer busses because you can feed multiple sources to a buss, and those busses can be bussed again (so drums buss, bass buss, vox buss, lead buss could be the main busses, then you could have acoustic drum buss, electronic drum buss pointing to the drums buss, and so on)

It's totally up to you. you might even simply get the sound you like, print to audio, then open a new project, audio stem in on one track, no DSP and voila off you go.

Experimentation is key and pretty fun too

[Tom_Har]

Thank you guys for all the help