The “Golden Rule”
One of the most important things in my eyes is to capture your source material as best you can during the recording process. Try to spend the extra time with microphone positioning, very mild EQ and compression and whatever else it takes to get the sound you are trying to achieve. There is a saying, ‘Crap in = Crap out.’ This is pretty self explanatory, but basically it means that if you record poor quality signals or use low quality samples you are most likely going to end up with a poor sounding mix. Spend the extra time it is tedious but it is worth it and this will set you apart from the rest.
If you are a hip-hop producer, buy better sounding drum samples and VST instruments to get better sounding drums or learn to make your own. If you are a producer working with live bands, learn microphone techniques, which microphones are typically used for particular recording scenarios and wrap your head around EQ, compression, gating and basically all the other techniques in this guide.
Remember, there are no rules, just guidelines and its best to learn the standard techniques, tips, and production tools that you have available to you.
Bussing has many great uses from vocals to drums and everything in between. You may have a scenario where you have a mix with a lot of drum tracks (Example: Kick, Snare, Hi Hats, Tom Drums, Over Heads, etc...) and you would like to control the overall level of the drums without having to adjust each instruments volume fader separately. Common practice is to create a stereo bus track and then send all the instruments, in this case, the drums to the stereo bus. Once all the drums have been routed to the stereo bus you now have the capability of lowering the volume of all the drum parts with the Drum Bus Stereo Fader.
From there you can add multi-band processing, EQ, and anything else you feel should be added to the drums. If certain elements need fine adjustments then you would go back to the individual faders and make the necessary changes there. This technique is not limited to drums. Experiment with this and see if you find your own ways of routing audio and applying effects.
Bussing