What is Bus ??

[Studioplayer]

Help!! I'm reading articles and trying to found out what the Bus is used for? When and how do I use it? For what purpose? I'm also looking for info on effects chain. When I add effects in my program (I use Acid) do they act like a chain? Any help would be appreciated. I'm sort of confused in these area's. Especially the bus.

I hate it when I don't understand something. Aaaarrrghhh !!!!!!!! 

Dave

[Davidinoz]

A bus is what you catch when your car breaks down......




Sorry couldn't resist it
A bus is just a summing point for various signals - as in auxilliary bus on a mixer. It's where several inputs are combined into 1 signal.
An effects chain is just a combination of effects - you might have a compressor, EQ and a reverb on a track. That would be an effects chain.

[Studioplayer]

I usually take a Taxi. 


For example I can put compression and reverb to one bus. Assign that bus to a couple of tracks and use that for adding effects to all those tracks? Kinda like a short cut? 

The chain I understand. I was wondering if the order that I place the effects in my program work much the same as if I was placing effects for my guitar? IE. should I make sure that my EQ is before my distortion? 

[Davidinoz]

I was wondering if the order that I place the effects in my program work much the same as if I was placing effects for my guitar? IE. should I make sure that my EQ is before my distortion? 

There are no rules. If it sounds good then it's right.

[Cary]

I usually take a Taxi. 


For example I can put compression and reverb to one bus. Assign that bus to a couple of tracks and use that for adding effects to all those tracks? Kinda like a short cut? 

The chain I understand. I was wondering if the order that I place the effects in my program work much the same as if I was placing effects for my guitar? IE. should I make sure that my EQ is before my distortion? 

Compression is best used serial, like the guitar effects chain.  Assigning a compressor to an aux bus and bringing it in like that is going to cause comb filtering due to the latency of the plug-in.  Thats a whole other topic.

Anyway, as in the actual definition, 'bus' takes you somewhere.  Typically, all your channels of your DAW are assigned to the MASTER (or STEREO) bus.
Anything routed to a particular 'bus' will go to wherever that 'bus' is going.  In my example above, the channels all go to the stereo outs.

[Tacman7]

The other day I had some vocal lines all done with volume automation throughout so it was just right.

Then I was too hot in the overall mix so I wanted to dial everything down a bit and I didn't want to redo all the automation so I created a vocal bus and sent my vocal tracks to it and then I could lower all the vocals as needed but they would still have the volume adjustments happening for the individual tracks.

Or if you had a bunch of drum parts put them to a bus and control the overall gain.

Also a bus can save CPU resources: if you were going to put the same echo on 6 different tracks putting one plugin on a bus would be better than 6 individual instances in the individual tracks.

[Studioplayer]

Ha! Now that makes sense. Thanks guys.

So much to learn and so little time. I think I'll be 90 by the time I figure it all out.