Busses

Cubase
1

Hi everyone,

I have looked high and low for BASIC information about busses in Cubase A8. I find that every article or Youtube video plants you right in the cold water at the deep end of the pool. Everyone assumes you know all the terminology and are at least an intermediate user!!! Are there any links that explain how busses work from the word, “Go???”

As I understand the basics, there are two types of busses:

  • Hardware—this is the physical stereo outputs of the UR44 or whatever sound module you use


  • Virtual—these are assigned to each instrument inside Cubase in the VST Connections window under the Output tab

Beyond that, I have no idea what the heck they’re talking about. From what I’ve read, the big guys recommend assigning ALL instruments to their own bus, especially drums.

When I recorded my last song, I used the MIDI drums from my Yamaha Genos. After recording, I separated all the MIDI instrument tracks to individual MIDI tracks and performed my edits. Then, I created the audio tracks from each MIDI track. At that point, I think I should have assigned each drum sound to its own bus. For example, if I had five different drum sounds (kick, ride, brushes etc.) I should have assigned them to five different busses.

Does this sound good for starters? What happens after that? Do you assign these busses to separate channels? I wish someone would pretend to explain this stuff to a Grade 1 kid :slight_smile:. Thanks…

2

You have a sound, you need to control it. Volume would be your minimum requirement - fader.
You may want to change that sound, delay, limiter, distortion etc. You’ll need to bus that, or a portion of it, to said effect
You may want to do add same effect to multiple sounds (drum kit) so bus them to a group and add.
Basically just routing in the case of artist( it can get more complicated with side chain) .

3

An audio bus is in a certain way similar to a bus in traffic: it „collects“ different audio signals from different tracks and „brings“ them, to a destination. This destination can be a hardware output, a virtual output, an FX processor or whatever.
If for example you route several drum instruments to a group channel, your group channel is a bus. If you send from different tracks to an FX processor, then the FX that contains all the different signals from the different tracks, is a bus.
And drums are usually not bussed to several busses, but to one (group) bus, so the can be (for example) compressed or voulume changed as one complete instrument, while you can do the processing of the single instruments on the different single channels.

1 Like
4

Thanks guys!

For some reason, this forum is not alerting me in my email that I have responses! Otherwise, I would have replied earlier.

Edit
Found the problem. I forgot to turn on notifications in my profile. Hopefully, it will work now. Thanks again.