Setting up a Drum Bus

A

adam79

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I've been messing around with tracking/mixing the drums. I'm curious how you guys setup your Drum Bus when mixing. At first I was sending the Main Outputs of all the drum tracks to a Stereo Aux. However, I've recently been sending all the drum tracks to the Stereo Aux track via the Sends...leaving each drum track's output to "MON L/R." I activate the FMP feature on each track's send to keep the pan settings on the bus (I hard pan my two overheads left and right 100% and usually leave the close mic'd snare and kick in the center). So instead of just having the drums playing thru the bus the original tracks are also being heard. Is this how a drum buss is usually done? Thanks.
 
This is a very strait forward (easy to follow) example how this would be done in a pro environment. If you have any questions about the signal flow or routing, feel free to ask.

I'm going to post a video of this in a sec, if I can figure out how to do it.

The mp3 of the actual mix (JMK 1) is attached below the pictures.
 

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Just for fun...here's a quick youtube video snapshot of the mix actually rolling :D

 
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RFR said:
That sounded good, and btw, nice console.
:D
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Thanks. That's actually just half of the console. I can't set the whole thing up because the rooms in the house aren't wide enough. I'm still waiting on the new studio to get built.
 
You can take it a step further and put your toms into a single bus, and snares or kicks, if you have multiple mics for those. Then send those to a single drum bus that further routes to the main out.

So, for example, tom-> tom bus-> drum bus-> main out

Whatever works for you, really.
 
When setting up the drum bus do you just change the track output to the bus being used or do you also enter the that
bus as a send too?
 
adam79 said:
So instead of just having the drums playing thru the bus the original tracks are also being heard. Is this how a drum buss is usually done? Thanks.
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No, that's not how it's usually done. Some people like to do parallel processing, but most of the time you want to only hear the drums through the bus itself. Most of the point is to have one fader that controls the overall volume of all the drums. When you turn that fader all the way down, you shouldn't hear any drums at all.
 
Seems like you are parallel processing your drum tracks. I don't think that's normally done by default unless there's a reason for it. If it sounds good to you then keep doing it. But do you use leave the original tracks alone and compress or eq the bussed signals, or do you just pan them?
 
Not sure who that's a reply to, but yes I usually have a drum bus that goes out to the main. The drum bus collects the tom and kick bus, as well as the other individual tracks. I compress the drum bus a bit. Like I said, whatever works for you. That's how I do it. There's more than one way.
 
adam79 said:
When setting up the drum bus do you just change the track output to the bus being used or do you also enter the that bus as a send too?
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Just to reiterate- yes the tracks outs are simply reassigned to the the Drum sub-bus (AKA a sub group). You could do the similar using aux sends, but it'd be less straight forward (jumping through unnecessary hoops). But you want only one path or the other. The Aux sends -and their sub busses strengths are for effects sends (and returns), or for other parallel processing - i.e. any second paths made to be mixed back in with your main signals.
 
ashcat_lt said:
No, that's not how it's usually done. Some people like to do parallel processing, but most of the time you want to only hear the drums through the bus itself. Most of the point is to have one fader that controls the overall volume of all the drums. When you turn that fader all the way down, you shouldn't hear any drums at all.
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I disagree with that. Its very common to have 4-5 parallel chains running simultaneously. And that's simply impossible to manage under one fader.
 
musicgeekandlvr said:
Seems like you are parallel processing your drum tracks. I don't think that's normally done by default unless there's a reason for it. If it sounds good to you then keep doing it. But do you use leave the original tracks alone and compress or eq the bussed signals, or do you just pan them?
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Bus post fader/post pan out of the channel strip to a stereo sub bus. Apply compression to the stereo subgroup, then send the stereo sub group to what is commonly referred to as a 'crush' track. So you have transient management compression on the initial track. Stereo compression on the bus track. And then hyper mashing in your face compression running parallel to the stereo compression on the crush track.

You need to know to properly manage a compressor chain to do this though, and you MUST have good enough monitoring to where you can hear the differences in the attack and release times between 100 us (uniseconds) and 1 ms. And you have to know how to properly synchronize the release times between your pre-bus track, your bus track, and your parallel track. Or else your gonna get squeezing and pumping like a sick hyprecompressed clusterfuck.
 
If the pro tools signal chart was hard to understand, here's a simpler diagram using just the toms as an example.
 

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musicgeekandlvr said:
Seems like you are parallel processing your drum tracks. I don't think that's normally done by default unless there's a reason for it. If it sounds good to you then keep doing it. But do you use leave the original tracks alone and compress or eq the bussed signals, or do you just pan them?
Click to expand...

I've recently been experimenting with making a separate bus for the OH pair and then sending that to the main drum bus. I'm now sending all the drum tracks to the drum bus via the main output.

The reason why I like using the send bus along with the main out's is cuz of the FPM feature (or whatever it's called) that saves the Pan data; I pan the OH mics hard left and hard right. I read somewhere that if u dont use the FPM feature in the Send (and only route through the main outputs ) the pan settings won't translate to the drum bus. Is this accurate?
 
The reason why I like using the send bus along with the main out's is cuz of the FPM feature (or whatever it's called) that saves the Pan data;
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Did you say what DAW this is?
And that still didn't really say why you want this tracks using two paths to get to the final outputs.
 
jkuehlin said:
Which DAWs do you use?
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Pro Tools w/ the Apollo Duo interface. Was the guy from the video I watched correct about the FMP (not FPM like I wrote earlier) being the only way to keep a track's pan value when sending it to a bus (which would mean that sending tracks to a bus, via the output drop menu, doesn't carry the pan values with it). So I'll either do both, send all the drum tracks to a bus by setting the main track output to a stereo Aux, as well as, sending both OH's to that same bus via the send (as well as the output). I've recently been using an OH bus that I eventually send to the Drum Bus, but if I send my OH's, via the send, to create an OH bus, will I lose the pan values when sending that bus to the Drum Bus via the main outs? Hopefully you followed that!

I'm definitely gonna try the "crusher" bus next time I'm on PT. This is just used for drum tracks, right? Whoever mentioned the crusher bus made it a point to have a deep understanding of parallel compression. I've never tried this method...is there a good article, forum thread or video you could link me to that will help me better understand. I could Google it myself, but there are some many search findings I thought that you might be able to make things easy for me if you know of any specific places that have proper explanations and execution details.

Thanks.
 
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