PC-Based Home Studio Setup - Part II, Catch the Busses

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What a couple extra busses on your mixer can gain you.

If you have the means to go a bit beyond the basic setup described in the previous article you will have a little easier of a time routing signals back and forth and not getting any signals crossed.

The bigger mixers give the user more "busses" out, and each channel is assignable to one or more of these busses. Why is this cool you ask? You may notice in the previous article that the mixers primary outs go to the sound card, and the sound card goes to the amp. With more busses, a secondary bus can go to the sound card in and the sound card out can go back to the mixer and sent out the main outs.

To do this you need to run your left and right sound card outs to a couple channels on your mixer. These channels should be assigned to only go to the main outputs. Any channel that you are running an instrument with should be assigned to the secondary busses, then, only that signal will be running into the card and you won't get other signals bleeding into the recording, then it will loop out of your sound card with the rest of the mix for you to hear.

This allows you to have fader control over the volume of the main output and also have total control over which signals are running to the sound card so you don't get signal bleed on your tracks.

This setup is useful during mix down as well. If you are only listening to and mixing down your recording, not recording anything new. The mix down can also be easily routed back to the mixer, run through any outboard effects you have like a compressor, finalizer or anything of that nature, then have the signal run back into the sound card and re-recorded on two mix down tracks.

All of this can be accomplished easily, without having to unplug and move any cables at all, it's just done by setting channel assignments on your mixer.

Now how cool is that?

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User-submitted comments

Tim
Mar 05, 2003 08:39 am
Fat tube digital signal
Would you belive we have deveolped a analog to didgital interface that preserves the fat tube sound in a digital format?

[email protected]

Fender
Mar 12, 2005 04:31 am
Awesome !
Wow, clear and well said ! awesome site thanks,


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