Building Your Mix Bus: How to Route Audio in Your DAW | LANDR Mix Tips #1

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What is bussing? What is a bus in mixing?

Bussing is the process of routing audio inside your DAW. Your DAW mixer is a powerful tool, and there are many ways for signals to flow within it.

Organizing that signal flow effectively is an important part of good mixing.

In this video I’ll go through the most common ways to bus audio in your DAW and how to set them up in your sessions.

What are busses?

A bus is an internal signal path for routing and combining audio.

In the analog era, individual console channels would be summed electrically by an amplifier at the master bus to create the stereo mix.

As engineers refined their mixing techniques, console designers implemented additional busses for summing groups of channels together before the final mixdown.

In the digital domain, busses take the form of Aux return tracks, and you can add as many as you want to your session.

To understand bussing we need to talk about sends and returns.

You can visualize the signal flow of your channel strip starting from at the top with the input and flowing downward toward the fader.

In general, mixer strips are laid out in this order:

Input
Inserts
Sends
Panning
Level
Solo/Mute
Output

The “send” stage is an additional output from the channel that occurs before its fader section in the signal flow

Aux sends are typically routed to effects inserted on aux return channels.

This creates a parallel signal path where the channel send level determines the signal’s strength going into the effect.

This kind of parallel routing is typically used for ambience effects like reverb and delay.

In this configuration, the effect can be set to “100% wet” so that the blend of dry and effected signal can be managed in the mixer using the faders.

But there’s more to bussing than just routing delay and reverb.

It’s common practice in mixing to give each instrument its own dedicated bus.

In this case, instead of routing a track’s send to the aux input, it’s output is patched there instead.

When the output of multiple tracks are sent directly to the aux return track, they can all be processed together on the bus.

Instead of a parallel path for mixing wet and dry, this serial signal chain allows for submixing of elements within a mix.

Processing related tracks on a bus helps you save resources and minimize the negative effects of EQ. It also gives you easy access to high-level control in your mix.

In this example I’ve tracked a bass guitar with a DI as well as a mic’d up amp. I used a dynamic mic and a large diaphragm condenser at the same time to capture the full response of the amplifier.

To process them, I’ll send the output of all three tracks to a mono aux return and use the individual track faders to adjust the blend of mics and DI to taste.

Now that my bass bus is set up, I can start applying EQ to all three sources at once to keep things consistent and contained. This will also help minimize phase issues from EQ’ing the individual mics differently.

Bussing is an important process for controlling the flow of audio in your session.

Now that you know how to route your signals, get back to your session and set up some busses.
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