Bussing simply means routing audio from one or more tracks to an “auxiliary” track in order to process them as a single unit. Think of it as putting an audio signal on a “bus”, to send it from one place to another. For instance, if you wanted to put a reverb on 10 different tracks, you might use bussing. Rather than putting the reverb on every single track, instead, create a bus, apply reverb to it, and send all ten audio tracks through the bus. That way every track gets processed by the same reverb, creating a sense of cohesiveness and saving 90% of processing power.
Studio One makes it very simple to create and manage bus tracks.
In this example, I would like to
- Apply reverb to all the green tracks, and pan them hard left
- Add a delay to a all the blue tracks, and pan them hard right
- Reduce the volume of all the red tracks by 24dB
Lets look at the mixer. To add a bus for all the green tracks, select them all (ctrl/ shift-click) and choose “Add Bus for Selected Tracks”.
Do the same for the blue and red tracks. Notice how the output of the tracks automatically gets changed to its new bus. You can also re-assign bus inputs and outputs by simply clicking on the output and choosing from the drop-down menu. The audio from each track will now pass through its respective bus track before hitting the main output (speakers). Any processing that is applied to the bus therefore affects the audio passing through that bus.
Lets apply the desired processing to each of the busses:
Now each effect is being applied to the tracks we specified.
Of course, we can set the output of a bus to another bus to create a chain. This is useful in certain mixing scenarios.
