Drum Bus Routing

[siderealxxx]

Halo there.

I typically don't work with a huge amount of drums/beats so don't have huge experience with mixing them (Logic user). I'm curious how people route when mixing in relation aux/sends/busses.

Typically I will have layers of drums on individual channels with EQ and effects etc. I will then bus sections (kick/snare/toms/metal) into aux channels and apply any group specific effects and most likely a send for reverb.

However where I'm not sure what's best is how to send all those aux and reverb channels back to a single aux where I can apply master effects (EQ/Compression/Saturation etc), ie superglue to knit it all back together.

Obviously I can just set the output of each aux channel and effect return to a new aux and i's fine, but it gets difficult to keep track of everything. Is there a better way? How do people do this?

Thanks in advance.

[muzines]

Summing track stacks in Logic are a pretty good way of managing this.

[Drew Stephenson]

Hmm. I can tell you what I do, but I'm not sure I'd take my advice on anything so I'll wait until some of the better brains arrive!

[The Elf]

I find Logic's terminology confusing, but...

I typically route all my drums to a 'Drums' sub-group. I sometimes will sub-group my snare mic's, and sometimes my toms to sub-groups too, but then these groups will also be routed to my overall 'Drums' sub-group.

I find it pretty easy to keep track of this, at least in my DAW of choice. But then I do find the routing in Logic mind-bogglingly strange.

[muzines]

Logic can do all that too, but some of the newer features like track stacks have some workflow advantages...

[The Elf]

Oh, I know it can do it - it's just strange.

[Luke W]

I too find the world of Logic to be a rather odd place. I'm using it a lot more these days so I'm getting my head around it more and more, but it still makes me frown more than it makes me smile at the moment.

[CS70]

Generally I send individual tracks to individual buses "kick", "snare", "overheads", "toms".. the kick bus may receive from the dry kick, a parallel-compressed kick, and maybe a sample reinforcement generated by a synth. Same with snare, there will be the top and bottom "dry" mics but also any specific processing I want to control separately, such as a reverb - all these buses go into a "Snare" bus.

Similar to the Elf, I end up sending everything to a "Drums" bus which then contributes to the master and has a send to the glue reverb. If I have a room mic, it also contributes directly to the "Drums" bus. Nothing fancy and as I would do in a real desk.

After many attempts (read: messes) I've come to a reasonable workflow for related work as well: corrective effects are made on the tracks (hi-passes, for example, but also any little equalization for resonance or stuff I don't like and stuff like console/tape emulations), and so is overheads panning (snare and others, on the buses). "Creative" work is usually done on the summing buses and so are rides. If I want more edge on the drums, I can then process the drum bus as a whole.

Finally, I tend to color-code all related tracks (drums are, for some reason, pink) so it's easy to work on the large number of buses by just glancing.

[siderealxxx]

Summing track stacks in Logic are a pretty good way of managing this.

Thanks, I'll take a proper look at this. At some point a few years back I stopped paying attention to half of the new features in Logic. I must be getting old...

[muzines]

Track stacks are simply a way to have one self-contained channel strip that consists of multiple other channel strips inside it.

(A bit like having a bunch of channels, say individual drum mics all outputting to one aux/group channel - the whole drum bus).

As an example, let's say you have a nice synth sound - it consists of three plugins, on three different channels, and some of those are bussed to an aux channel with some reverb. You have four mixer channels - three instruments, and an aux channel, to make that sound.

A summing track stack simply means that you have one channel in the mixer, that contains the output/mix of all those four channels (hence the "summing" nature - you can have non-summing ones that behave a bit like folders too), and can be treated like one channel in the mixer (plugins put on it, routed etc just like any other audio channel).

A click of the disclosure triangle reveals the channels "inside" the track stack, so you can process them individually too.

And you can save that as a Patch, so you can with one click call up your three synths + reverb sound.

It's convenient as it lets you hide the clutter of the individual channels that make up the track, and treat them as one thing, while at the same time, easily letting you reveal and get at the individual channels inside



Logic has all the usual buss/aux routing, VCA faders and so on just like the other DAWs if you prefer to work that way. I use a combination of both, but track stacks are nice as they let you simplify the clutter of multiple channels to a bus, and keep related tracks together in a self-contained way, while losing nothing of the flexibility of the individual channels.

[siderealxxx]

Track stacks are simply a way to have one self-contained channel strip that consists of multiple other channel strips inside it.

Thanks for the explanation and example. This does look neat (my OCD likes organistaion!). I will def give this a go.

[siderealxxx]

(drums are, for some reason, pink)

Drums are blue! Pink?! Whatever next.

[siderealxxx]

Nice there's a still a forum where you can ask sensible questions and get sensible answers btw!

[CS70]

(drums are, for some reason, pink)

Drums are blue! Pink?! Whatever next.

I would tend to agree, and nevertheless...

[Matt Houghton]

Drums are blue! Pink?! Whatever next.

You're both wrong, of course...

[Drew Stephenson]

Thank you Matt.

Drums are red obviously.

[CS70]

Nada. I just checked and they're still pink. Don't know what the DAW is thinking

[The Elf]

Drums are red obviously.

+1! (though I downgrade them to orange to leave red for temporary warnings!)

Speaking as one who enjoys synaesthesia, once I've coloured the tracks in my arrangement I find getting around as natural as breathing. Bass green, guitar blue, strings yellow...

[muzines]

I tend to think of guitars in various shades of light orange to dark brown - eg, acoustic guitar will be a fairly bright orange, as it's a lightish sound, then electric guitars will be darker shades of orange or brown, down to basses which will be dark brown.

Strings will often be yellowey, but I don't have too much of a convention for other stuff. Maybe vocals will be pinkish, with the min vocal being lighter pink to stand out more from the darker pink bvox.

Pads and waftey sounds maybe in the blue range, again, often lighter sounds with lighter shades, heavier sounds with darker shades.

To be honest colour selection in Logic isn't that flexible, you can only choose from a predefined bunch of colours which is a little silly...

[siderealxxx]

Glad I'm not the only one who meticulously colours everything in. I even use the little icons!

More colour options in Logic would be nice though; Sunburst, tolex, wooden end cheeks...!

[siderealxxx]

Track stacks are simply a way to have one self-contained channel strip that consists of multiple other channel strips inside it.

I just did a test on this and it differs from your example in that the destination of a send on a track isn't automatically routed into the master.

From Apple: "The destination aux of the bus is assigned to the main track." But I'm not seeing this behaviour... I can route it manually though but then I'm just doing the same as before...

[muzines]

I just did a test on this and it differs from your example in that the destination of a send on a track isn't automatically routed into the master.

From Apple: "The destination aux of the bus is assigned to the main track." But I'm not seeing this behaviour... I can route it manually though but then I'm just doing the same as before...

I don't really know what you are doing, but if, for example, you've already created a track stack, and then added a send from a channel in the track stack expecting the created aux you're sending to to be automatically added to the track stack, it doesn't (and nor should it - you are free to send subtracks to whatever auxes you want, those auxes aren't forced or moved into the track stack. You don't want, for example, a global reverb to be moved into the drum bus just because you sent the snare to it).

If you specifically want an aux contained in the track stack, you should either create the track stack including the aux (ie whatever channels you want in the track stack) or move the aux into the track stack.

[siderealxxx]

If you specifically want an aux contained in the track stack, you should either create the track stack including the aux (ie whatever channels you want in the track stack) or move the aux into the track stack.

Fair enough! The wording implied otherwise. I guess it's just a neater way of working with some other benefits - cheers

[muzines]

Exactly, yep!