Now before we get practical and start on our mixes, I wanted to give you a quick idea as to how various types of routing work. Now the the most simplest routing or busing, you can think of is the sum of all the mixing channels are making their way over to the main left and right bass net, I mentioned that one there kind of makes sense to us because we've all seen this on various mixes reviews. If we want to bring up the level of the snare drum, we would go to that particular channel and bring that up. But if we wanted to bring up the entire mix, we don't adjust every channel up and try to keep that mixed together we go make all those adjustments on the left and right and the left and right gets the output of all those individual channels. But this is not just the only way to route signals.

We also have things like ox basses, inline inserts, or subgroups DCA vcas, which brings up all sorts of challenges like a signal flow and gain stages. Let's look at each of these guys one by one. In terms of all the different types of routing, I would kind of break them down into two different ways the signal flow, and then also what I call remote control. So signal flow are things like orcs, basses, subgroups, effect sense, and inserts, all of those things. Why why I call that signal flow is that your signal is actually going through an ox bus. It's going through a subgroup, it's going through and effects and if this was back in the analog days, they'd be wires connecting all of that kind of stuff.

We're in the control section. We have things like vcas DCs, and also groups. Now in this area, like a VCA Master, when you move that up and down is not actually nothing's being routed through it. It is just controlling Other parts of your mixer if this sounds a little esoteric right now, we'll see some examples in a moment, but just kind of think routing is either in a signal flow. In other words, a signal is going from one place to another, or else under the control thing. Various things like vcas DCs and groups are actually remote controlling other parts of your mixer.

Okay, I have a very basic example in Pro Tools, we set a kick drum, a snare drum and a hi hat. And over in this side, you can see that mixer across here I brought down the Hi Hat because that was a little hot, and let's listen to what we have. So let's imagine we want to show you how to route things using either the inserts or the effects ends or the offsets the inserts, very simple. Imagine if we wanted to place a noise gate across here just to get the snare drum. In fact, if I solo the snare drum to hear how the highest That's a little bit of a kick drum is bleeding through on that microphone. If we go into the inserts here and we go down into dynamics and bring up a gate, then what will happen if we play that.

So if you heard that that is now gated everything below that threshold, in fact, if we would bring that down new VA here, basically everything will raise that it's getting a little bit dry, I think I'd bring up the release. Might be a little bit dry for my taste, but you get the idea. With an insert. This gate is placed right in line, this entire signal of the snare top is going right through this gate the entire signal goes right through Let's compare that to using an effect send or an oxen. Let me just take that off now. And now what we're going to do is use an N effects and the way you do that in Pro Tools is you go up here in the track, we're going to new and we'll do a stereo auks input, we'll create that and we'll name that reverb.

Okay, so now this is an ox input here, and what we do is insert a reverb into this. So the entire auks channel right here is going through this reverb. And what we do is stand a different amount of that, say in this case of this net, I'm going to unsolo that and we'll go down to here and we'll use bus you can use any bus you like. We'll start with bus number one. And then what you do is then set your awks channel to read the input of that bus number one and two. That means that as I bring this up and down, I'll be adding a portion of this channel over to this.

This ox channel, which is drowned in this reverb and let's have a listen. Now to me, this is a little bit it's not as intuitive to see it this way as this way I'll show you. If we go only view and we'll go expanded sends send a then you have a little fader up here that seems to be a bit more intuitive to my eyes anyway. So now it's the same thing if we want a little bit of reverb. We dial in a letter. We dial that in.

So you can see the difference between the sins and the inserts in the set. You have a variable amount that will go off someplace else. In this case it was bus number one and two, were this ox channel or Reddit input from bus number one or two and had this reverb inserted completely across it. Kind of get the idea. And in fact, while we're here, we might look at pre and post send as well, if we were to set this up as this is set up as post send, so what that means is you hear Matt here, that reverb. Now if I bring down the snare top that will track this will track after this.

So in other words, if I bring that snare all the way down, there's nothing that is being sent across here. But over here, as I bring this up, as I'm bringing this up, that send is post fader stop. So that's going across here, if I was to set this to be preferred Then here's what happens. Look at the level over here. I bring this down, all I'm doing is bringing down the dry snaps off, but because this is before this fader is sending off over here. So let's see how to do this in logic.

Okay, over in logic we have basically the same three tracks kick, snare, top and hat. And we have a mixer down here as very, very similar to Pro Tools. So for example, if we wanted to say solo, this kick drum and then you wanted to correct and pull out those snare drum bleeds. Then we will just go down here to audio effects and noise good. Sorry noise gate. And here we go.

So listen. I still hear that snare drum coming through. You can see when it's open when it's closed, that snare drum is gone. So that is an insert. Everything in the audio effects right here is inserted across this entire channel. But let's, let's unsolo that.

And let's imagine we want to do the thing again that we did before, which was the reverb on the snare drum here. So that is underneath the sense here. And now what we do is go down here to the bus and get the next free bus which is ox bus to. Now you'll notice that a new channel has been made over here and that's automatically been the input that has already already been set up to being bus number two. So that means Can you guess what we can do? We're gonna need the audio effects right here and we would go down to the reverb.

Now, that reverb is placed across inserted across this orcs channel if you like, you could nameless reverb. And as you can imagine, then you could do your send right here. And of course, you could do the same thing over here, set this to bus two and put some of your kick drum there. So you can see using those, those effects and it's a great way that you can add varying amounts of each channel across to this channel here which has a reverb inserted across it, your sends and your inserts. So similarly in reason if you're in the mixer mode here, here's your insert area. And here's your sensor area right here.

To bring up an insert, you just click on this little folder icon For example, if I went through dynamics drums and brought up a drum gate and double clicked on that, I can close that back up. And that has been loaded up here. So if we were to solo that kick drum and adjust that threshold, we could be getting that kick drum. Again, anything inserted, the entire signal is going through it. If you want something different and just add a little touch of something, you'd be using the effect sense right here. And because the reason, UI is kind of set up very much like a mixer, specifically a particular SSL console, it looks a little bit more like an analogue kind of console than anything.

Now in terms of adding effects. It's a little different. You'll find as you get around reason, it's a lot of drag and drop. So if we open up the rack right here, and I brought the browser, then I would go through my effects and see if I wanted to bring up the reverb our district That underneath the master section. And then if I was to close this this down and go back to the mixer, you can see that that reverb is across here. And now, if I can ascend on got varying amounts, maybe a bunch on the kick drum.

And you can set that up to be pre or post right there. So no matter what da w using, you're either inserting things across, or you're using an effect send. Now we'll look at subgroups or in the term of reasons they're called output buses here. I have electronic drums and MIDI kit and also a deep kit here. Imagine I wanted to group all of these together. So instead of adjusting these all individually and trying to keep their relative mixed together, what I could do is select all of them in this case, if I Just hold down shift as I'm selecting more the output bass, it normally goes out to the master section, but I could make a new output bass.

Well, there's a short keyboard shortcut there. And let's imagine I'll call that D bus. So now all of these instead of going out to the regular left and right, which is all the way over here, they are going to be going over into this drum buss. And then in turn, this drum bass goes out to the master section. So this is just a way to kind of group all of these together. So if I was to play this, I've just got these three solos up.

Bring that down. There we go. Now, in this case, all of these have been routed out into this new bus or a subgroup if you like, because it's a routing thing. Then I could add effects to this and would affect everything coming through here. So, for example, add a bunch of reverb or whatever, because a signal flow goes out of these into this D bus and then you can because this is a real audio path, then you can add it, you can add EQ, you can add insert effects, you can add a whole bunch of stuff because this is an actual signal flow. Now let's see the difference between that and how Pro Tools deals with groups.

Now contrast those subgroups which actually allow for signal flow across channels. Let's look at groups in ProTools. And this you can see this in various other da W's as well. What we'll do is it go on the track and group and then we can make a new group. Imagine we wanted to group together the snare top and snare bottom so that when we move one, we move the other one So that the the relative blend of them always basically stays the same. So what we could do here is called that snare.

And what we're going to do is select a number of these. And we'll remove them. So the only things that are currently in this group is snare top and snare bottoms. So here's what goes on. Now when you grab a snare top and snare bottom, they both ride along together, there's been no signal routing, they're just kind of linked together. In this situation, I think I can hold down Control and measure if I wanted to, to have a little bit less snare bottom.

If I hold down Control, then I can momentarily change that relative mix between these and then when I let that go, then they will both move up and down like that. Now there's another way that we can do this underneath. We'll go on the track and new and we're going to select a VCA mark. To now a VCA Master, if we come across here, we imagine we were to call this snares or just snare anomic, all cap if there are VCO masters or anything like that. So here's the deal. This is assigned to no group right now.

But if I select that to snare, then this will move up and down. And you can see that that will move in relative amounts. In other words, if I was to hold down control, and bring this way up, when you move this up, you'll notice it's advancing that faster than than advancing. This is keeping the relative blend between them constant or bring this back down to where it was. And so you can see you can adjust both of those from this VCA master. Now, have you noticed anything kind of interesting about this VCA master there is nothing.

There's no insert, there's no sense up here because it is not an audio channel this is not signal flow going from here, across to here like we saw just a moment ago in reason, a moment ago and reason we're actually sending the audio of this out to another group which which then we could add effects things like this because this is not an audio channel. This is a remote control of this. There is no audio stuff here. So do you get the idea between a subgroups when there's actual signal flow, and subgroups, in this case was a VCA master where it's really just remotely controlling other channels