KVR Audio

ghostwhistler · Post by **ghostwhistler** » Mon Feb 20, 2023 9:50 am

That is, if I use a drum bus, do I only want to hear the sound from the bus or mix it with the sound from the individual drums as well?

Thanks

DMG68 · Post by **DMG68** » Mon Feb 20, 2023 12:49 pm

That’s entirely up to you. You could use the drum buss for parallel processing (any processing on the individual channels pass on to the buss as well though) or for your main processing. It’s not uncommon for people to have more than one buss and mix them to taste.

ghostwhistler · Post by **ghostwhistler** » Mon Feb 20, 2023 4:57 pm

generally i do parallel because it beefs up the sound. But if there reasons that's a bad move I don't know them. I just use my ears

jamcat · Post by **jamcat** » Tue Feb 21, 2023 2:39 am

Usually a drum buss is used so you can treat the whole kit as a single instrument while mixing. You can't very well fade in your drum kit or mute it if you've got the individual drum mics mixed straight into your master as well.

kritikon · Post by **kritikon** » Tue Feb 21, 2023 9:38 pm

ghostwhistler wrote: Mon Feb 20, 2023 4:57 pm generally i do parallel because it beefs up the sound. But if there reasons that's a bad move I don't know them. I just use my ears

That's a well-tested technique, though seems mostly to be an American thing. Absolutely no reason to not do that if it sounds good. TBH if I were doing that I'd probably just use the wet/dry knob on an insert comp over the drum bus, but it's the same thing...just easier IMO. A mix knob seems to be fairly standard on most comps nowadays.

DMG68 · Post by **DMG68** » Tue Feb 21, 2023 10:22 pm

This may be interesting for the OP. Of course, there’s more processing you can do on a buss than just compression, this example includes some saturation as well, but it’s coming from the compressors.

_leras · Post by **_leras** » Thu Mar 16, 2023 10:34 pm

ghostwhistler wrote: Mon Feb 20, 2023 9:50 am That is, if I use a drum bus, do I only want to hear the sound from the bus or mix it with the sound from the individual drums as well?

Thanks

The drum bus is to group your drums together. Once you have them sounding good and balanced you can them control volume of all with one volume fader.

Two things:
1. One you have that drum bus, you can route it to multiple channels and e.g. over compress, saturate, compress with a different compressor then blend all these back into together to you taste.
2. You can seperate out your kick completely, and procrss it seperately from the rest of your kit.

Are you meant to only hear from a drum bus?