In this article, Damian Kearns outlines a bussing technique you might not have considered before: Direct Bussing to a processing channel. Do you do this? Here’s the how and why.

Atypically Speaking

Though my Pro Tools template has been available on Production Expert for a long time now, the bus path I’ll outline below isn’t in there by default because what I’m about to describe is an atypical mix workflow for me. You don’t need to be a Pro Tools user to apply this logic to effects sends either. It’ll work in most DAW’s. I’ve tried to write this so it’s easy to follow and emulate, no matter what platform you’re on.

I admit I have been mixing using the same ideology for many years now. I say ‘admit’ because I don’t tend to deviate too much from my usual signal flow unless some unique challenge comes my way. I developed my working template to the point I barely ever have to do more than switch a send from pre to post here and there to arrive at the desired results and when I was satisfied it worked, I shared it with the Expert’s community to help out. However, I do have some tricks that aren’t part of my typical mixing approach. In this article, I’ll share one.

The Inspiration

A little while back I received two projects that beckoned a different approach to hitting my reverb plugin. One had a sound effects build on some tracks slated for a tv treatment or ‘futz’ as I like to call it and another was an interview piece with three subjects sitting in a nice, large, old brick loft. 

In both sessions, I was dealing with multiple tracks needing the same treatment to place the elements in the same space (or tv) at the same time. Time for a post fader send! As it turned out, I decided on a different approach. 

The Approach

Rather than using an aux send from each audio track to bus to my stereo reverb aux track, I bussed the outputs of an entire set of tracks to a single reverb track and let the reverb track’s output feed my submaster. Sound a little confusing? It’s not. I’ll walk you through it. 

The first thing I did was pick the destination reverb I wanted. In this case, I had Liquidsonics’ Cinematic Rooms on a stereo aux track and I added McDSP’s Futzbox to slot A so I could create the TV futz first, then place it in a room, using Cinematic Rooms in slot B. I like to think a lot about how things naturally occur and then try to mimic them, as an audio workflow. The TV would be my sound source and the reverb would be the room around it. So, Slot A for TV and Slot B for reverb.

To make things easy on myself I right-clicked (or control-clicked) on the aux reverb track’s mixer input so I could rename the I/O (which is actually an AUX Send bus, not a physical input) to “TV FUTZ”. I do this renaming sort of thing to prevent myself from accidentally bussing anything else to this same reverb that I don’t want to treat. All my reverbs are on AUX tracks by default. I do sometimes place a reverb or effects plugin directly onto an audio track but only to give me the option of sending something ‘wet’ or ‘processed’ into one of my regular reverb bus sends for additional processing. 

Next, I selected the sound effects (SFX) audio tracks I wanted to bus directly to this ‘TV FUTZ’ processing track. I batch re-named them (selected the tracks, right-clicked or control clicked on the scribble strip and selected ‘Batch Rename’ from the pop-up menu) and colour-coded the tracks using the Color Palette window found in Pro Tools’ ‘Window’ menu at the top of the screen. I like to do this to make my tracks stand out from each other. Colour really draws the eye in swiftly.

Now named and coloured, I just needed to bus them. I selected all 5 of these tracks by shift-clicking on the name scribble strip at the bottom of the tracks. Then, holding down SHIFT and OPTION together, I clicked on the track’s output. A pop-up menu appeared and I then clicked on my recently renamed “TV FUTZ” buss. At this point, all my bussing and renaming is complete.

The Process

I played the audio a few times with the reverb bypassed so I could get the futz right. I found a TV model I like and though I played around a little with it, I stuck with 100% wet so that none of my original dry sound is mixed into the plugin’s output. I wanted this audio to sound fully like it was coming from a TV, 100%. 

Next, I added in Cinematic Rooms, found a preset I thought worked well, then started immediately playing with the wet/dry mix knob until I found what I thought sounded like the audio actually existed in the space I was seeing in the video I was working to. After I got this reverb setting right, I played with the other controls until I felt like the audio all sat nicely together ‘in the room’. 

The Advantages

Though I used the one SFX session to demo this, I applied exactly the same logic to the other dialogue session I mention earlier, though I did not need a TV futz setting for that audio. Why did I bus this way? Here are the advantages to bussing directly into post processing like this.

1. An entire environment or effect can be shifted or altered on just one track and affect all the input audio exactly the same way.

2. I don’t have to automate individual sends. If I want to go wetter, drier, more tv, less tv, longer reverb tail, bigger room, etc. it can all happen in one place and I can hear the effect on everything feeding the reverb or futz at the same time. 

3. It’s much easier to automate a mute or fade out the reverb on the reverb track since it’s all going to just the one place. 

4. In a typical ‘post fader send’ scenario, there’s always a certain amount of dry sound coming into the mix. With this method, I can go 100% wet to 0% wet (bone dry) with the twist of one knob in my reverb plugin. 

Conclusion

I have to say, the dialogue sounded so sweet when I used this approach. All three lavalier mics I was given sounded so unnatural that adding them into a room in this fashion made it really sound like the space was what I was seeing onscreen. It reminded me of how back in 1996, at the request of one of my bosses who was having trouble matching ADR to location dialogue, I once printed an entire dialogue track for a movie of the week by playing it back through a Yamaha NS-10 on the studio floor to give it all an identical space. The mixer on that project then opened up that dialogue print track when he wanted to smooth out the interior dialogue of some problematic scenes. This process I’ve outlined today path really smooth out a scene’s sense of space as well.

It also made fixing some of the dialogue edits a little easier too since I could hear the reverbs ring out happening on harsh cuts, whereas if I’d edited only monitoring the dry lavaliers, I’d have added the space in using iZotope’s Dialogue Match or a Mono Dialogue Reverb I have inside my template. This just felt smoother, like I was live mixing. It was so quick too.

If you haven’t tried directly bussing into your effects processing, give it a go. It might be fun on a drum kit or a collection of mics meant to sound live or futzed through some device. You can dirty things up, place them in a space, compress the hell out of them, fill them full of echoes; whatever you like. At any rate, it’s always good to try out new approaches to old problems. This is how new sounds emerge or old problems find better solutions.