Aux and Bus?

[TropicAllegro]

This is probably a stupid question but I've heard a lot about aux's and buses and have no idea about their function, importance or when you use them.
Can anyone clue me in as to what they are?

Thanks.

[bennychico11]

An aux is usually referred to an auxilary track. In the digital world some people use it to send several signals to it so you have one track that controls the volume of all the other ones. In the both the analog and digital world it's also used for effects. This way you can assign a reverb to the aux track and still have the original dry signal on the other track. So when you turn up the aux level (also called the aux send) on a track you'll be turning up how much is being sent to the master aux track...in this case the reverb. But the signal on the original track still passes through like normal. In other words, you're just copying it to the other one.

A buss/bus is just a pathway from one place to another. Just like the bus in your city that takes you from place to place, a bus sends signal from one place to another. If someone says, "Let's bus channel 7 to channels 3 and 4," they just mean send channel 7 to channels 3 and 4. It is also possible to bus a channel to 3/4 but still keep it on 7....or bus it to 3/4 and remove it from channel 7. For example, if channel 7 on your mixer is not working (you'd do this more often on larger consoles)

hope this helps

[TropicAllegro]

Thanks man, that clears it up.

Still going to take some time to learn to apply it but I have a much better understanding of it now.

[ecktronic]

You can use an Auxiliary track as an input for recording. This means you can add an effect to the signal as it is recording so the effect is printed on the recording. I use a hard compressor on the way in to avoid any peaks when recording. Set your input to an aux channel, put a compressor or maybe limiter on it and then buss the output of the aux track to the track you want to record to. ie. Input- aux - track1 (for kick).
But once recorded the effect is printed on so cannot be undone. So that is why i only use this method to stop peask rather than to add an effect that changes the sound in a way i want it to. That is left to the mixing stage.