Buses and VCAs

A send takes a copy and the strip carries on: that is an effect channel. A route is where the strip goes instead: that is a bus. A VCA carries no audio at all: it is a hand on several faders.

So don't answer a level problem with a bus, or a processing problem with a VCA. Neither grows into the other.

G

The buses and the effect channels on their own, and back

G leaves only the strips that receive standing: the buses, with the VCAs and the effect channels after them. The tracks go off the screen and keep playing, and the line underneath says so.

A bus takes the audio from several strips and gives you one fader, one EQ, one compressor and one set of sends for all of them. Drums into a bus, backing vocals into a bus. You stop balancing twelve things and start balancing one.

A bus is a strip like any other, in the same list as the tracks, so the layout you already know is the layout you get. It says BUS where a track says IN.

Make one in the track list: pick the strips, press + BUS, or + BUS ST for a stereo one, and the bus stands just after the last of the strips it was made from. The desk holds up to eight.

A strip may only feed a bus that stands after it, so nothing can ever loop. The OUT cell steps a strip around the places it is allowed to go. A strip that may not go somewhere stays where it is, and the desk says how many. Taking a bus down sends what fed it to the mix, and says how many strips it moved.

A VCA moves faders, not audio. Nothing is summed and nothing is routed: the strips stay where they are and where they go, and the VCA pulls them all up or down while the balance between them stays exactly as you set it.

Up to four, standing between the strips and the effect channels. Assign them in the track list: pick the strips, press V1 to V4, and each row wears a tag saying which hand is on it. +VCA on the desk is where a new one comes from.

The member's own fader does not move, on purpose: the fader is the request, and the meters already say what is happening. Muting a VCA silences its members smoothly, and their own M buttons stay as they were.

A hand is named and coloured on its own plate: double-click to type, ⌥-click to step the colour. A VCA can ride a later VCA with INTO, never an earlier one.

Use a bus when you want to treat the group as one sound. Use a VCA when you only want to turn the group up. The sends are tapped after the fader, so post-fader means post-VCA.

⌘1 to ⌘9 recall a group, which is only a way of looking: it reaches no fader, no route and no sound. It decides which strips are on the screen, and nothing else.