    
ja
Posted From: 64.136.27.227
| | Posted on Monday, August 16, 2004 - 05:04 pm: | |
Your master volume knob is the "master bus"
they just call it "master" instead of saying master bus
you use busses for several reasons.
there's the "vocals" bus, the "guitars" bus, the monitor busses.
You have many possibilities with busses. You could use the busses to make up the master bus, or the busses as seperate monitor busses for monitors onstage. Its all about how you route the signal.
When you're using busses, you're taking your entire mix, and seperating it into groups. This way, the if the horn section needs to be softer in a particular part of the song, you can just turn down one fader or knob, instead of each of the horn's. Or if you have more than one singer: once you get your "Vocal Mix" the way you want it, instead of creating it again, by turning several knobs, every time the volume changes, all you have to do is "turn up the vocal section."
"Bouncing tracks down" to a bus is especially usefull, when micing the entire drum set, and every other group for recording. "Turn guitars up...done."
In my band we have a drummer with a 10 peice kit, and another percussionist with a 7 peice kit. Using busses allows us to use one bus for our drummer and one for our percussionist. The guy working our sound board can bring up the "percussion bus" when things get mellow onstage, to bring out the subtle things the percussionist is doing.
Some mixers have options to run the sound from a channel/track, to both the master bus and any number of other busses. This is useful when playing live. You can use a few busses to give each member of the band their own unique monitor mix.
Maybe I'm a little ahead of myself.
On each channel, their should be a send. This "send" usually routes the sound to a particular bus (now, the signal still is routed to the master if you choose, but its also routed to "1" or "2" or "aux" or whatever other bus you're sending the signal to--the name of the send knob you phisically turn should be the same as the name of the bus fader you slide up and down).
Note: some sends are designed for external effects like EQ, Reverb etc. and won't necessarilly send the signal to a bus on your console.
The basic path of a mixer runs "down and to the right." "Down" each channel: trim/gain-->treble--> mid--> low--> sends-- (pan) --> "right" to the guts of your mixer: effects bus--has a send and return--, monitor busses, master bus, every other bus you've created in each song or setting.
Every bus has its own mix that you create with the sends on each channel. The fader for the bus (or knob in some cases) is the "master volume" for that bus. Sliding it up, makes the entire mix of that bus get louder in a synchronized way, so the song can be its best.
Using busses live, allows you to give the singer more or less rhythm guitar in the mix that he hears onstage; and the the rhythm guitarist more rhythm guitar in the mix he hears. This way, if one of your guitarists likes to play too loud for the rest of the band to sound right, you can suggest turning his amp to where the tone sounds the best, not the loudest: the best, and recreating that perfect tone louder through the mixer at a good mix level, known as front of house sound, or FOH. This way, you tell that asshole to turn down, without hurting his feelings. If he still wants it louder, he can have a little more of his guitar in his monitor mix to hear himself louder, while the rest of the people in the room hear your band sounding like its mixed well. And if you don't have monitors yet, musicians friend sell them for like 40 bucks each. You do get what you pay for, they'll last a little longer than the warranty, but i think you can buy replacement warrantys cheap...
Busses are like athletic support bras...they group and seperate (and they can be played with at rock and roll concerts)
Remember there are right ways to level out instruments, but the way you mix them is what makes good bands sound good, and great bands sound great.
You're starting to get into the fun parts of mixing music, busses are the tip of the iceberg.
Wait till patchbays, processers, isolation chambers, floating rooms, and microphone selection based on certain preamps start to come into the question.
Have fun.
ja
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