What’s The Best Way To Organize My Instruments?
There is one aspect of mixing and mastering that is very essential to the process. Using aux buses. Using aux buses makes mixing so much easier because you can add effects to tracks in bulk.
Mix Bus/Aux-send - (auxiliary send) is an electronic signal-routing output used on virtual mixing consoles in recording.
The signal from the aux send is often routed through plugin effects like reverb, digital delay, compression, etc.) and then returned to the aux bus.This allows effects to be added to a track or multiple tracks.
Benefits of Using Buses
Let’s say you’ve just recorded a really dope hook, which would in a lot of cases involve 3 or more individual tracks.
You’d probably want to put some reverb or delay on it to see how it sounds. Well if you add a reverb plugin to each track this will most likely affect the cpu usage of your computer (which slows down your computer) and it’s always a hassle to configure the settings you want in that reverb plugin on each individual track.
This is why we use aux sends or buses. You can set up an aux bus, load your reverb plugin onto that aux bus and set it up the way you want it to sound one time.
After that you send it to each of the tracks in your hook and you can add as much reverb as you want on each track with just the twist of a knob.
This same formula can work with delays, compression, and any other type of effect you would like to experiment with.
When I record I often set up my vocals through aux buses. I’d open an aux track and add all the basic vocal plugins I would want on my vocals like eq, compression, and a de-esser.
After I decide what plugins I want on my “Vocal Aux Bus” I send the output of all my vocal tracks to it.
This just makes my recording process less complicated and better for my cpu usage which gives me some leverage If i need to add special efx like auto tune or pitch correction to individual tracks.
When mixing I often use a “whole mix” aux bus. This is for when I am done with a mix and need to bring the overall volume of the mix down without touching any faders.
All I do is send the output of each track in my mix to the “Whole Mix” Aux and I am able to bring my overall volume down to give the mastering engineer some “head room”. This also helps to keep your mix from distorting.