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SET UP YOUR BUSSES

Planning on using Reverb for your mix?     Set up a global Reverb bus to get started.

 

Parallel compression for your drum tracks?

Set up a bus with your compressor.

 

What is a bus? 

To keep things simple for the sake of understanding, a bus is basically an audio path for routing audio signals from one point to another (just like a bus that takes you from one place to the other).

Let me explain it with an example.I have two audio tracks (a vocal and piano track) that has audio recorded on it. I would like to have the same amount of reverb and delay effect on both audio tracks. One way would be to have the same reverb and delay settings as Inserts on the two audio tracks. But it is definitely not CPU efficient. So a good way to optimize CPU efficiency and processing power is to have a bus going out of the piano and vocal track through “Sends” to an Aux Track that has the Reverb and Delay added as inserts. This is called the Send Return.  So we are basically sending a specific amount of signal from the respective piano and vocal tracks through the Sends.

 

There are types of sends namely “Pre” fader and “Post” fader which we look at in a second.

The Bus concept doesn't just apply to effects.Buses are used a lot in audio post production in developing mix stems and and also for creating multiple headphone mixes in music mixing.

Post Fader

Logic has very flexible routing options!   When you set a Send to be Post fader, the signal will travel all the way through the track before sending it to the Bus.

Pre Fader

When you set the send to be Pre Fader, the signal is send to the bus BEFORE it passes by the pan and fader on the track.  

This means that you can alter the track volume without altering how much signal is sent to the Bus.

This is very important information that you should understand.

 

 

 

 

 

REVERB

While we are here, you should learn about reverb!

REVERB

 Chromaverb is a good way to get started.

Here is a quick tutorial on the use of this tool.

What to really go deep?  Learn about convolution reverb.  

Convolution reverb takes an input signal (the sound to be reverberated) and processes it with the sound of an actual or virtual acoustic space to create the illusion that the input was recorded in that space. The sound of the acoustic space is captured in what is called an impulse response (IR), which often starts as a recording of a short, sharp sound, such as the firing of a starter pistol or the bursting of an inflated balloon (the impulse), in the acoustic space in question. As you can imagine, such a sound excites the reverberation (the response) in the space, and so the impulse response (or at least its initial recording) sounds like an explosion followed by the reverb reflections of the space. 

Jump to 14 minutes in for Space Designer

BE SURE YOU HAVE YOUR BUSSES SET UP and A SCREEN SHOT OF YOUR WORK POSTED.

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