Create an audio track (CTRL+T) for your bus.Open the Audio Routing section by clicking on the I/O button right below the master fader in the lower right corner (CTRL+I).So with all this being said, here are some pointers for creating your first buses. But by using buses, you’ll be able to route any audio signal to any channel you wish. How so? There are certain techniques that just aren’t available to you when you’re “grouping tracks,” such as sending a parallel compression return track to a group, or applying effects to two groups at once by grouping them together (groupception). Nevertheless, Ableton aficionados may want to begin using buses more often, given that their use simply opens up more possibilities in terms of mixing the music created. Note that neither method is better than the other: they are exactly the same. Other DAWs prefer to emulate traditional mixing consoles by routing the desired channels through a bus. There are several DAWs, including Bitwig and Ableton Live, that allow you to “group” tracks together.

If you have several drum channels (kick, snare, hats, toms, etc.) playing in the DAW that you are using, it would be wise to send and route them to a drum bus, onto which you could then apply some warmth or glue with mix bus compression. This may sound daunting, but allow me to provide an example to clarify.

But rest assured, readers: the term “bus,” in this case, does not refer to a 33,000-pound vehicle, but to an audio channel that allows a multitude of audio signals to pass through it.īuses are used to apply general processing to the mixed signal, so as to achieve a more cohesive effect over a particular range of instruments.

The word “bus” may sound foreign to many beginner- and intermediate-level music producers who were not raised during the good old days of analog mixing on consoles.

Track bus