The Ultimate Guide to Using Buses!

if you are not using buses in your productions you are one wasting time and two putting way more strain on your computer than is necessary what's up you guys nathan larsen here with another video for those of you guys who make music at home whether you're a composer producer artist songwriter if you write and record your own music at home this is the channel for you and listen if that sounds anything like you at all you should subscribe the channel right now because i promise you're gonna find a lot of value on this channel and you have nothing to lose if you don't like the videos in a month just unsubscribe and once again i asked you guys in the community post which video you would like to see asked you guys for three different video topics you guys overwhelmingly voted to see a video on buses and how and why to use buses so again another perk of being a subscriber you get to vote on what videos i make so come on like what's not to love so in this video i'm going to be explaining how to use buses in production and not just how but why you should use them and hopefully clear out the air because this is something that i think a lot of newer producers really struggle with comprehending and understanding and hopefully i can explain this in a very easy to digest way so one make sure you watch this entire video because if you only watch a little bit of the video and click off you're not really gonna get a whole lot of value from that so stick with me to the end i promise that this whole video is going to be relevant for you so let's go ahead and jump right into logic okay so what i have here is a session um i'm probably going to play a little bit at some point here for you but basically what we're going to do is i'm going to create a new audio track here and then i'm going to start from scratch and show you exactly first of all what buses are and then how to use them and why to use them in that whole thing so let's kind of make this a little bigger here so we've got audio that we'd be recording in here right so let's just solo this out hello this is nathan larson making a video about buses okay so i just recorded some audio obviously nothing really fancy but what we are going to do is so what i'm going to do though is show you how to use buses what they do in the whole nine yards so think about it this way a bus if you think about a bus like in a city it's going to take you from point a to point z where you actually need to get off but in the middle there are all these other little stops you're going to make right so think about it that way that what we're going to do is we're going to take this track right and we are going to send the audio this little piece that i recorded here somewhere else before we get to the final destination which is the stereo output or you might hear people say like mixbus and we'll get into all that here in a second so we have two different ways we can do this okay the first way is through effects bus so now what an effects bus is going to be is think about we're over here right the audio exists over here the stereo output is over here now right now in this specific case we're going from point here which is just in the track all the way straight to the output when i play this ready hello this is nathan larson okay so that's literally just going from the track straight to the stereo output where you are now hearing it however we can insert essentially something in the middle where the audio can go somewhere in between those two points we've got point a here the stereo output but in right now we've got a straight line but what if we kept that straight line there but we added like a little third spot and then made a triangle hopefully that kind of makes sense to you so we still have that straight line but we now have this additional little triangle where we're going to stop somewhere else so in logic the way this would work and you would need to figure this out in each of your own daws we've got our sends here now right now we have no send so we can send this to a bus right and so i'm just going to go ahead and do this to something that's empty you can do any number of buses you can see here i've already got you know a delay bus spaces bus gang vocal a decapitator a small room this really disorganized right now but i'm just going to go ahead and do bus 12 for simplicity now as of right now i just sent it to bus 12 but there's nothing going to this bus because right here it's set to zero we can take this dial and increase that dial now if we increase that to zero or unity like that then what's going to happen is this audio here is going to basically send the exact same to the bus right so basically you're going to get the output going to the stereo output and the exact same zero sent to the bus as well so we basically are eating two like a copy of both now you can set that to zero and then notice here in the inspector you have bus 12 here and this is empty but let's go ahead and do this let's just go ahead and add a reverb let's do one that's not going to take a whole lot of work on my computer so we'll just do chromaverb okay so now what we're going to do you want to have you can set dry up but typically you're going to have dry set to zero wet to a hundred percent we've got a room here now watch what happens if i turn this off so that was the bus is off the send is off and this is just the dry signal hello this is nathan lars right now when i turn that bus on we are now sending basically a duplicate to this bus but since we have dry turned off here on the reverb none of that dry signal is going to go through you're only going to hear the reverb signal let's listen to this hello this is nathan larson making a video about well you know look at that now that's pretty extreme right but the cool thing is here now on this auxiliary channel or this bus we can take this fader down and we can now mix that in appropriately so let's turn this to zero and watch this hello this is nathan larson making a video about buses boom hello this is nathan larson making and of course we can change the room we can change you know whatever this is just a kind of a lame example that i'm giving you here but then what we can do is we can actually send another one we could send another bus let's do a different one here let's do bus 13 let's do zero you can also do do your mixing by the way you can do it here and have the aux channel set or the bus basically set to zero and do your mixing here sometimes i do both i don't know why but we'll just go ahead and do zero again to have things with good continuity the next thing you can do is like a delay right so let's do a tape or a stereo delay that's usually what i like doing um and this is what this would sound like hello so obviously that's ridiculous let's do a high cut here let's do get remove the lows and then what we can do is again mix this in hello this is nathan larson making a video about buses okay so obviously again this is like me talking there's no way you would want delay and reverb on here like this but this is the example that i'm giving you here to demonstrate the power of this now this is what you would call an effects bus basically we're using it to mix in effects right so we're sending the audio again think of this example here we're going to the stereo output but then we're basically sending it somewhere else first to be impacted to then add that effect now the benefit of doing this is let's say that i had i don't know 15 tracks of vocals that i want all to have the same reverb so they sound like they're in the same space all in the same delay what you can do is send every single one of those to those buses so instead of putting the delays and the reverbs on the individual track if you're doing that you are putting way more strain on your computer than it's necessary that's way more work than necessary instead send it to a bus because we can send every single track to these buses if we so desired so like i've got this random track here i could go to my vocals here i could go in here and send this to that uh reverb and then i could mix that in there as well and let's say that i don't want as much then i can make those adjustments right here instead does that make sense i'm going to go here to no sync because i don't want to do that okay so that would be effects buses and you can do this however many times you want you could do a compression you could do reverbs any number of things that you can do to start changing and manipulating things and then you'll hear people talk about things like like parallel compression the idea is that you're going to send a duplicate to a bus and then compress the snot out of it and then mix that compressed signal in there as well that's a whole other thing so that's how you use the effects buses now what i want to show you here let's go ahead and just take all these off okay so what i'm going to show you now is how things can get really fascinating so notice how when i had this example you go straight to the output but then you've got this little detour now notice that the detour is down here because there's two happening there's this the drive signal and then the quote-unquote wet signal going right that's mixed in but what if instead in this line to the stereo we actually put the bus in the middle rather than down here so it's actually you're sending the actual output to the bus itself and then to the stereo stick with me here stick with me here so what you can do is go to the output here which is automatically gonna set the stereo output again this is in logic but it works in any daw okay so you're going to want to find where it has your output and what we can do is change the output to a bus so we're going to just do a different one let's just do like bus 32 to keep things really kind of simple my output is now the bus so if i play this hello this is nathan larson it doesn't sound any different right which is it's not going to but now the actual signal is being sent to that bus entirely like it's not just here's a duplicate and then we can kind of mix that in it is actually just going there first that is the landing point and then anything we do to this bus is going to now affect everything else that is sent to that bus hopefully the distinction makes sense so the example that we could use for this is let's say we've got all of our lead vocals and i think actually on this yep so this is my lead vocal here so here i'm going to actually just play this for you a little bit this is a pretty cool track here [Music] [Music] so this is a arrangement of feeling good cinematic pop which i will be having a music video for here very soon keep an eye out so in this case i do not want my email here go away so in this case you can see here on the lead vocal i actually have my output set to bus 23 lead vox lead vocal bus and now notice what i have on the on this bus i have my psychu which is a eq plugin and this is going to affect every single thing that gets sent here and then i have an effects rack plug-in put in here this is from sound toys and so on here i have devil lock and decapitator to just super epic plugins and then look at here i actually took the bus and then i sent the bus to in effects bus two effects boxes so this is where it gets really crazy so hopefully you can get this so we've got the track here the audio on this lead vocal and it's then going sent to this bus over here where every single lead vocal that's happening in these different tracks is going to go right there in one place all having the same plugins on here and then this bus is going to go to the output here the stereo output but now in between we've got these effects so we've just increased basically all the different points from point a to point z essentially so all this is is just routing things in a different way that is going to ease up the workflow make things a little easier so the benefit of doing this is again rather than throwing delay and reverb and all this stuff on individual tracks we can actually send them to a bus where they're going to be impacted and then everything we send to that is going to be impacted that way so if you have three different or four different or however many different vocals or whatever it is and you want all that to go to one bus and then all that stuff to go to effects buses you can do that it's gonna save your computer a lot of of power basically because you're not going to have to run a bajillion plug-ins instead you can have one plug-in that does its one job and everything is sent through it hopefully that makes sense that right there is the how and that is also the why this one was really short and simple so if you haven't already done so you need to subscribe to the channel because i drop videos every single week two videos every single week as well as a live stream every single thursday evening where you guys can just come and hang out with me ask me questions and all the nine yards so make sure you like the video if you like the video that helps me out a ton with the youtube algorithm and lets everyone else know that this video actually is pretty good drop me a comment let me know what you think would love to hear if you have any questions about this topic see in the next one

Channel: Nathan James Larsen

Views: 112,490

Keywords: how to use busses in production, busses in logic, bus in logic pro x, logic pro x bus, logic pro bus, how to use bus in logic pro x, busses explained in logic pro, busses explained, bussing explained, bussing in logic pro x, bussing in logic pro explained, how to bus in logic, how to use busses in logic, how to use busses in logic pro x, logic pro x bus tutorial, bus tutorial, bus in production, bussing tutorial, what is a bus, how to use busses, nathan larsen, logic pro x

Id: NFxmPglXlos

Length: 12min 54sec (774 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 09 2020