Buses and routing allows us to control the flow of audio in Ardour. Routing, in general, can be handled in Ardour by JACK, which is an all-inclusive audio and MIDI routing and porting system that works well on Linux computers (and can also interface with other applications). Routing is also very complex, since it encompasses both JACK, MIDI routing, and audio routing between buses, tracks, the master track, plugins, etc. Needless to say, it can become convoluted quickly. A good example to understand some basics behind routing is to think about how each track and bus routes to the master bus. So, the number of inputs on the master bus must be equal to the number of track and bus outputs in the project.
Buses
Now you might be familiar with tracks from previous articles, but what's a bus? Buses themselves are similar to tracks in where they are found and how they can be manipulated. They are found by default on the left side of Ardour near where your tracks sit, and can be added in the same dialogue as tracks can. However, buses are software devices onto which we can route/send audio from tracks (often multiple tracks). Buses can have plugins and automation applied to them, just like tracks.
A common use for a bus, and what we'll use a bus for in this particular project, is to apply the same plugin or automation to multiple tracks.
But before we start routing anything, let's first figure out how to make a bus. You can make a bus the same way you created a Track, click Track > Add Track, Bus, or VCA... and this will open the Track and Bus creation wizard.
Once you've opened the wizard, you need to figure out what you'll be routing into the bus. In this case, we'll be routing two sample audio tracks, the ones that contain our high hats, into the bus, so we want to choose Audio Bus. If you wanted to route MIDI tracks into a bus, you would select MIDI Bus, and the process following would be very similar.
Creating a bus is almost identical to creating a track (in fact, according to the definition, a track is a type of bus, so they're almost the same thing!) We should give our bus a descriptive name so that we can tell what it's function is in our session, and then choose our configuration. Since I'm working with Mono tracks in this project I've chosen to make this bus Mono. A more advanced setup might be to route two mono tracks into the two inputs of a stereo bus to create a stereo output. Buses are very flexible and allow for lots of routing solutions.
Once you click "Add and Close" your bus will be created, shown below.
Now you can see our bus added right above our MIDI tracks and below our Audio tracks. Since it's ready to use, let's configure it.
In this project, we will route the two high hat audio tracks into the bus completely so that we can configure plugin automation on them both at the same time. If you don't understand what plugins or automation are yet, don't worry. Check out the other articles on Using Plugins and Creating Automation.
There are a couple of ways to route tracks into a bus, but I think the following is easiest. First, find the track you want to route. Let's first route the "Hats" track. Select your track by highlighting it, so that the left-most toolbar, which shows the fader and plugins for your track, is visible. Next right click in the plugin toolbar and select, New Aux Send... and select the name of the bus to which you want to send the track's signal. In this case, I would select New Aux Send... > Hats Bus, since that's the name of my bus.
Once you've added your bus, it'll appear in the toolbar (shown below) where plugins would normally appear. Make sure to put it pre-fader, but post-plugins (if you want to send the post-plugin sound to the bus, it's totally up to you how you want your bus to function.)
Now that you're routed correctly into your bus, all you need to do is configure the way your tracks work with your bus. Since I didn't like the way the hats sounded because they have too much high frequency sound in them, I want to use the same low-pass filter on both of them, because I like their comparative values, but I don't like how high frequency they are compared to the other sounds in the session.
You'll notice in my configuration that I've turned the main fader on both tracks down so no sound comes out of the tracks themselves. Instead, I've turned up the fader on the send that sends to the bus, so that all the sound will be sent to the bus.
After that, I turned up the fader on the bus so that the sound plays from the bus alone, and added an Equalizer plugin serving as a low-pass filter to get the desired effects I want on both tracks. A perfect way to kill two birds with one stone!
Buses
Now you might be familiar with tracks from previous articles, but what's a bus? Buses themselves are similar to tracks in where they are found and how they can be manipulated. They are found by default on the left side of Ardour near where your tracks sit, and can be added in the same dialogue as tracks can. However, buses are software devices onto which we can route/send audio from tracks (often multiple tracks). Buses can have plugins and automation applied to them, just like tracks.
A common use for a bus, and what we'll use a bus for in this particular project, is to apply the same plugin or automation to multiple tracks.
But before we start routing anything, let's first figure out how to make a bus. You can make a bus the same way you created a Track, click Track > Add Track, Bus, or VCA... and this will open the Track and Bus creation wizard.
Once you've opened the wizard, you need to figure out what you'll be routing into the bus. In this case, we'll be routing two sample audio tracks, the ones that contain our high hats, into the bus, so we want to choose Audio Bus. If you wanted to route MIDI tracks into a bus, you would select MIDI Bus, and the process following would be very similar.
Creating a bus is almost identical to creating a track (in fact, according to the definition, a track is a type of bus, so they're almost the same thing!) We should give our bus a descriptive name so that we can tell what it's function is in our session, and then choose our configuration. Since I'm working with Mono tracks in this project I've chosen to make this bus Mono. A more advanced setup might be to route two mono tracks into the two inputs of a stereo bus to create a stereo output. Buses are very flexible and allow for lots of routing solutions.
Once you click "Add and Close" your bus will be created, shown below.
Now you can see our bus added right above our MIDI tracks and below our Audio tracks. Since it's ready to use, let's configure it.
In this project, we will route the two high hat audio tracks into the bus completely so that we can configure plugin automation on them both at the same time. If you don't understand what plugins or automation are yet, don't worry. Check out the other articles on Using Plugins and Creating Automation.
There are a couple of ways to route tracks into a bus, but I think the following is easiest. First, find the track you want to route. Let's first route the "Hats" track. Select your track by highlighting it, so that the left-most toolbar, which shows the fader and plugins for your track, is visible. Next right click in the plugin toolbar and select, New Aux Send... and select the name of the bus to which you want to send the track's signal. In this case, I would select New Aux Send... > Hats Bus, since that's the name of my bus.
Once you've added your bus, it'll appear in the toolbar (shown below) where plugins would normally appear. Make sure to put it pre-fader, but post-plugins (if you want to send the post-plugin sound to the bus, it's totally up to you how you want your bus to function.)
Now that you're routed correctly into your bus, all you need to do is configure the way your tracks work with your bus. Since I didn't like the way the hats sounded because they have too much high frequency sound in them, I want to use the same low-pass filter on both of them, because I like their comparative values, but I don't like how high frequency they are compared to the other sounds in the session.
You'll notice in my configuration that I've turned the main fader on both tracks down so no sound comes out of the tracks themselves. Instead, I've turned up the fader on the send that sends to the bus, so that all the sound will be sent to the bus.
After that, I turned up the fader on the bus so that the sound plays from the bus alone, and added an Equalizer plugin serving as a low-pass filter to get the desired effects I want on both tracks. A perfect way to kill two birds with one stone!
There's the final configuration of the bus. You'll notice, since the bus fader is turned up to an audible level, and the faders on both tracks' sends to the bus are turned up to a desirable level, the right amount of audio is routed from both tracks into the bus. That audio is then acted upon by the plugin, before being routed by the bus to the master bus. It's a complex process, but a neat one if you want to apply effects to multiple tracks with ease! If you're still shaky on how I set this all up, or how I configured the plugins and automation, check out the other articles Using Plugins and Automation.
If you're ever feeling confused about how you're audio is being routed, or your just feeling advanced, you can always open the routing grid for a specific track to take a look. Do this by clicking on the Input of the track (usually a number) on the plugins toolbar and selecting Routing Grid, shown below.
The routing grid will appear and you can inspect not only the routing of that particular track, but the routing of all tracks and buses in the project, shown side by side below.
This can get a bit complicated at times, but experimenting with it helps a lot! Stick with it, and you'll understand routing even better than you already do in no time.
Comments
Post a Comment