As soon as you send a signal anywhere, your stereo output, your headphones, you’re using a bus. You’re using buses whether it or not. So you might as well learn a few ways to configure them.
Some you may not have considered. First, the word bus. It’s not always clear.
This is the bus. It’s the connection between things. The destination itself might be called an AUX or a channel, a return or an output.
But when you go from here to here, you’re busing. And if you funnel a bunch of tracks and process them together, before you send them out the door, it’s no different. We just call that busing in series.
But if you need to go more than one place or in parallel, typically we do that with a send. Sometimes called an AUX. Now take a deep breath.
It’s just a fancy way of saying an extra output. This knob, it’s just another fader, except it’s round. It’s the bus that determines its destination.
If this fader comes after this one in the signal chain, it’ll get quieter when you pull the signal down. But configure it pre-fader and it doesn’t know or care anymore about what happens here. And in this way, you can craft yourself a whole new mixer.
Heck, you can make a bunch of them. Now there’s one other super useful way to use buses, and that is to make multiple copies of things. Think of the bus kind of like a Wi-Fi network.
You can create lots of destination channels and set them to listen on the same Wi-Fi network. And in this way, you can easily clone a signal, do different things with it, send it different places. Either way, you’re always using a bus because you’re always sending something somewhere.
And you can share that with someone who belongs in a Beat Kitchen class.
