I use MIDI and notation for everything, got a question about busses!

Dear Anyone.

I use notation and MIDI for everything, am disabled, can't use anything else.

Am trying to get the hang of mixing the New Age music I'm trying to write and I've hit a dichotomy (don't worry, am suing the guy who left it in the road!) I've read that in MIDI notation it should be one track one sound - so kick drum on own track, snares on own track, bass on.... you get the drift! I then read about busses in mixing, you're supposed to put multiple sounds on one bus so you can feed them through the same effects.

So here's the questions, if they're dumb, feel free to laugh like drains as you answer them.

One. Why the heck would you WANT to? I mean, if I'm EQ'ing - say - a piano, why would I WANT to EQ anything else exactly the same way? Surely the chunks of sound I'm removing to make the piano sound right in the mix wouldn't make the - for instance - guitar sound right, I'd have to remove different frequencies from the guitar, if any. So why would you WANT to bus multiple sounds to one plug-in? The only time I can think of doing that is if you wanted to raise the volume of the entire mix and that surely would be on the OUT channel (I don't know the techie names, have patience!) anyway.

Two. Assuming you've all convinced me that using busses is a wonderful idea (gonna take a bit of convincing that damaging two different sounds in the same way when the POINT of damaging one is to get it out the way of the other is a good idea, but anyway!) - how does that tie in with keeping different drums when writing the parts using MIDI on different tracks/channels is also a good idea. If I'm going to be bussing all the drums to the same plug-ins, why not write them all on the same track in the first place and shove the plug-ins on the track's output? If you have to apply different - for argument's sake - EQ settings to kick drum than for snares, you couldn't bus them anyway because that would be applying the SAME EQ settings to BOTH kick drum and snares, wouldn't it. I've read that it's to send different AMOUNTS of the sound to the same plug-in setting but what's the point? Surely it's more flexible to just shove the same plug-in on each instrument and adjust to taste? Or for things like drums, keep 'em on the same MIDI track and put the plugin on that.

So I'm confused dot com, mightily so!

I'm using Quick Score Elite Level 2 on XP SP3. It's one stave per sound/instrument and each output can have 4 plug-ins on it. It DOES have MIDI-Yoke and Rewire to join it up to other things like Cubase but as I'm a simple composer, piano'n'strings'n'pads (or flute'n'..... anything else'n'.....!!) I really think Cubase is overkill for what I do. I'm just trying to make sense of the vast amount of confusing mixing info. there is out there, all of which seems to apply to .WAV stems, not MIDI output. But this bussing business has me jiggered, it don't seem to make sense.

Yours hopefully,

Chrisulrich.
 
You do it however best it works for you. I've been using sequencers since black and white on an Atari 520 with Cubase, and every few years I find better ways for me. My collaborator uses cubase too and when I get his files, everything is different. Recently I started to need to be able to remove sections instantly for comparison or revealing, and I abandoned my usual direct to stereo mixing by adding groups, and then realised that I could run one instance of a reverb and put it on the group, rather than individual channel sends. It works fine and I can't really hear the difference. Now I'm balancing up five tracks of strings on the channel faders and then using the groups. I like it better, but I do this all the time mixing live events, I don't know why I didn't do it in Cubase? Probably mix automation, so it's just not necessary.

I use Cubase because it does everything I need, and it doesn't have limits. I like that I can edit in a score editor, or a piano roll style editor, or a simple list of events. I like it because my master keyboard can make it play and record, having buttons like a tape deck. I like it because it does what I need. It isn't better, it's just a comfy tool that I use about 10% of what it can do.

What I have got used to doing is have a separate instance of a vsti for everything. Even if one supports multiple sounds, I use just the first one, so each can have separate eq and effects. I might have three drums vsti said running so the snare can be treated differently. The vsti could let me make up new kits and have different outputs, but just simpler to open a new one, label it snare and treat it as a solo sound.

Surely it doesn't matter if a fader is a wav audio file or a midi track, I don't treat midi as something special, and to be honest I get very fed up when people slag off midi in general as something bad. We've kind of messed up what midi is, just the format the data is in from sound source to destination. We have good tracks and bad ones, I've never thought it fair to label bad tracks as midi. A bit like saying a book is bad because it's in English. In my projects I can never remember which faders are real recordings and which are produced in the machine because it doesn't matter. If they sound good, they are.

If it helps, now I'm using samplers like Spitfire Audio, I would miss Cubase's facilities, because recording with one hand on expression and modulation is vital and being able to edit that information simply is vital. Now I have got better at it, I can't imagine doing recording on something else. It also means that any entry system that doesn't involve the keyboard is out for me. Step or note entry from the score window just isn't cutting it with these clever samplers, which need you to play.
 
I think the short answer is, it's just a way to work that can save time if it suits your arrangement and workflow. And, it can save some processing power if it allows you to put some FX on a bus instead of 10 different tracks.

So, I don't think it's MIDI specific, but a pretty common technique to bus things together at some point, such as a drum kit, e.g. once the individual track levels, pans, EQs and even compression are set, I'd create a DRUMS bus/aux and send everything there. Then, if I want the "drums" louder/softer, automated, reverb/delay, perhaps ducked, that would get applied to the DRUMS in most cases, and not the individual tracks.

Different groups of instruments might be bussed together and sent to reverbs with different pre-delay to play with the depth feel. But, at the least, it's an easier way to control what's going into the Master so levels are easier to manage (for me, anyway).

Sometimes I even bus all the instruments together to duck against vocals if I'm having trouble getting something to sit right - it gives me a big hammer to try and see if there's something there, and I can move an EQ filter around in front of that which might get me to move it back to a different track or bus, like GUITARS, if I figure out that's where the problem is.
 
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