Bussing

[Alison]

Okay, silly question but, can someone explain "bussing" to me? I have yet to find an explanation in plain English!
Trying to figure out exactly what it is good for!

[Tadpui]

It's basically a way to combine or group tracks together. It's a technique that comes from the big analog consoles.

Let's say that you've got a gigantic, epic project with 120 tracks in it. A string orchestra, several vocal tracks, all sorts of instruments and a drum kit. Individually managing all of those tracks is a nightmare.

You could pan all of the mics from the orchestra into a nice stereo image and send them all to a single stereo bus. That gives you a single point to add any FX or whatever to the entire orchestra, without having to individually treat each track and without affecting any of the other instruments.

Then you can send all of the mics on the drum kit to their own stereo bus. Add compression or whatever only to that bus (don't want to squash that orchestra too!)

And maybe you can send all of the backing vocals to their own bus and compress them as a group so they gel together as a unit, rather than compressing each of them individually which might not yield the same "unifying' result.

Now you've got 3 stereo buses that represent dozens of individual channels. It's easier to manage them and apply certain effects to each group without affecting everything else in the mix or having dozens of instances of plugins or outboard gear to drive you crazy.

[Tadpui]

oops double post

[JD01]

OK, I can't really expand on what Tad has written and I'm not sure how Studio One (you use this don't you?) does Bussing. But Reaper (my DAW) has a simple folder system and it should describe as a picture what we mean with bussing, even if Studio One does it in a different way.

Reaper Folders.JPG

You'll see that I have Bass on its own. Then I have "All Guitars Meter" This effectively controls the level off all of the guitars in my mix together.
Within there I have loads of other little guitar sub-mixes, "boosted rhythms" "Crunch Guitars" etc. So. I can listen to say Boosted rhythms on its own, check that I'm happy with the balance of it. Then Listen to Crunch Guitars on their own, check that I'm happy with this. Then I can listen to both Boosted Rhythms and Crunch together - make sure they flow properly when they're together etc.

So I can eventually build up the "All Guitars" submix then check the levels against say the bass, my vocal buss or my drum buss. Making sense?

[Greg_L]

Lol. Wtf. All that for guitars?

[JD01]

Lol. Wtf. All that for guitars?

Yeah - there were a shit load of different guitars on that song. Doesn't have vocals yet. But it was the most extreme example I had handy to describe reaper folders. Although I've just gone bananas on vocals on another song! Check this out:

Vocal Buss.JPG

Its also probably more relevant to Alison, 'cos its a vocal buss where the harmonies also have further sub-folders controlling their panning either side. Normally I might have just not bothered making separate folders for each pair of harmonies but I thought it was handy for the purpose of this thread and if I find it useful I might continue with it.

[Greg_L]

Uh ok

[Alison]

Well, I think I get the picture! I've been reading a bit on bussing tracks, primarily drum tracks, so, this does make sense. I have recorded drums in the past but didn't bus the tracks. My recording is a bit simplistic at this point!
Thanks for this, I think it's a bit clearer. . . I'll have to try it sometime, maybe with a "choir" of vocals or a cello orchestra! Thank you!

[Greg_L]

Well, I think I get the picture! I've been reading a bit on bussing tracks, primarily drum tracks, so, this does make sense. I have recorded drums in the past but didn't bus the tracks. My recording is a bit simplistic at this point!
Thanks for this, I think it's a bit clearer. . . I'll have to try it sometime, maybe with a "choir" of vocals or a cello orchestra! Thank you!

Drums are perfect for bussing. Or maybe I should say busses are perfect for drums. A drum kit is obviously a bunch of individual instruments that make up a single sound source and you can treat the whole kit as one instrument with a bus group....if you want.

[Armistice]

How I get to work when there's a train strike...

[vomitHatSteve]

bus.PNG

This is the silliest "bus" from my most recent song.

Unless you count the drums, which have a ton of crazy routing or the lead vox (which has more weird routing per capita than anything else but is only a single track)

[WhiskeyJack]

So am i the only one here who doesn't know how to use the folders and bussing in reaper.

[Greg_L]

So am i the only one here who doesn't know how to use the folders and bussing in reaper.

Not entirely. I don't use "folders" for anything. No idea how to. 10+ years of Reaper and I've never even thought of a folder. Not even sure what it is. I do bus tracks to a group bus for drums and vocals.

[WhiskeyJack]

phewf.

[Tadpui]

I do use folders, mainly because I love that I can collapse them and clean up the tracking window. But I rarely nest them. I've had funky things happen (mainly with ReaInsert) if I nest them inside each other, so I keep the folders just 1 layer deep. But I use them in pretty much every project. They're a quick and handy way to bus things together.

[SweetDan]

Did somebody say Studio One?

I am still on a 3- (or maybe it's 4 now?) -year-old version (V2), but I think the latest version still has the ability to both group tracks in folders (seen in the tracking view) and to have busses (seen in the mix view). Here's how it might look in the mix view:

intoTheStorm_finalMix2_strippedDown_screenshot.png

The collapsed/narrow tracks to the left are the individual instrument or audio tracks. You can see I've got a mix of virtual instrument and audio drum tracks (6 total), and those are bussed to the "drums" bus track. 4 electric guitar tracks are sent to the "rhythm guitars" bus, 2 acoustic guitars sent to "acoustic gtrs", etc.

(Sorry, I don't have a screenshot of folders in Studio One; I just happened to have this screenshot since I was completely restructuring the track routing for this one, and took the screenshot mid-flight so I could recall where I was before committing to the changes.)

You may notice some of the audio tracks map 1:1 to a bus. That's not necessary, and would normally even be overkill, but I did that in this case because I ended up splitting ("muxing", multi-plexing) some of those individual tracks later, and now may actually be mapped 2:1 or 3:1. For example, the lead vocal I split 2:1 -- one copy of the track was for verses, the other was for choruses. Set up like that, I could apply different effects to each split track corresponding to the different parts of the song, but then still control the overall volume of the lead vocal relative to everything else via the slider on the "lead vox" bus.

[vomitHatSteve]

I love that I can collapse them and clean up the tracking window.

Absolutely! Especially as you start bouncing tracks into stems. It's nice that you can keep the original tracks in the project but have them taking up very little screen space.

[JD01]

So am i the only one here who doesn't know how to use the folders and bussing in reaper.

Not entirely. I don't use "folders" for anything. No idea how to. 10+ years of Reaper and I've never even thought of a folder. Not even sure what it is. I do bus tracks to a group bus for drums and vocals.

Really? How do you bus things in Reaper without folders? I didn't know there was another way of doing it.

[WhiskeyJack]

Not entirely. I don't use "folders" for anything. No idea how to. 10+ years of Reaper and I've never even thought of a folder. Not even sure what it is. I do bus tracks to a group bus for drums and vocals.

Really? How do you bus things in Reaper without folders? I didn't know there was another way of doing it.

I may be very wrong in how i do it now reading through this thread, but i just inset and new track set it up to receive all the pieces of my drum kit and call it a day.

[JD01]

Really? How do you bus things in Reaper without folders? I didn't know there was another way of doing it.

I may be very wrong in how i do it now reading through this thread, but i just inset and new track set it up to receive all the pieces of my drum kit and call it a day.

I find the folder system in Reaper is great for bussing.