Originally Posted By: Al-David
Hi Herb,

Tis always with a smile on our face we read your comments and crits.

I (Alan) have to admit my ignorance ... I'm not familiar with busses for vocal editing. Please give me a little info on that! We arrange and record in BIAB, use RT as a DAW and do a little shaping using Audacity.

Alan & Di


I don't work in Real Band using it as a DAW. I simply render my audio from it and then send those tracks to Sonar.

Most DAW's allow you to use busses.... RB might, I've never used it to mix so I really don't know if it does.

Quite simply you have tracks and then you have busses. A buss is simply another kind of track. IN a DAW, you send your track outputs to a MASTER OUTPUT or master buss. That's where everything ends up in the final mix. In Sonar, you can add additional BUSSES in between the track level and the master output level.

Why I use busses. Lets say I have 2 acoustic guitars and a dobro ..... three electric guitars and 5 vocal tracks plus all the other bass, drum, etc tracks. Since I want the 2 acoustics to sound similar, I can pop the FX into the tracks.... but then I end up with dozens of instances of FX plugs in each track..... add the electric track plug, the vocal track plugs and before long I literally have dozens of fx plugs and each one of them has to be adjusted and each one of them pulls CPU processing power. So.... I insert 3 new stereo busses.
One for acoustics, one for electrics and one for vox. I drop one reverb and one eq plug into the bus, reassign the individual tracks to the appropriate buss and the tracks stay empty. I now can do what I need to do in the bus. The reverb in the buss effects all the tracks coming in...same with EQ... compression...etc.

This really comes in handy on the vocal tracks. I pan the tracks, I envelope the tracks and send them to the buss. I pop the eq and verb into the vox buss and it generally handles everything at the same time. Occasionally I will have to effect the lead vox differently but not often.

Once everything is set properly, to raise or lower the levels of the vocals takes moving one slider not 5. This also allows me to insert melodyne directly into the tracks, fix the issue, and bounce it directly to the track without getting the reverb and eq permanently printed to the vocal track in question since the eq and verb are not in the track, they're in the buss further down the signal path from the track.

ON some occasions I have used busses for the opposite reason. Occasionally, the vox just isn't loud enough to set properly in the mix even when it's up to 0db..... so I insert a new stereo buss... name it "BAND" and route all the instruments to it. NOW..... I can turn the band down while maintaining the musical balance and envelopes I have taken hours to set up.... in about 5 minutes.

Every song I do uses this process. It saves time in the long run. Especially when you have spent hours working on something like vocals only to find that they need to come up or go down a few db......

Check your DAW to see if it supports bussing the tracks and play with it to get a feel for how it works. It is a very handy tool to use.

If Real Band doesn't allow bussing..... check out Music Creator 6 by Cakewalk.... it's a great DAW and is under $50 IIRC.... maybe even cheaper....

Last edited by Guitarhacker; 08/08/14 06:06 AM.
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