The Importance of Setting up Templates Within Your DAW Part 3

The Importance of Setting up Templates Within Your DAW Part 3

The Importance of Setting up Templates Within Your DAW Part 3

Here’s the final part of the 3 part series on the importance of setting up templates within your DAW.

In this final part we look at setting up your buss channels.

Buss Channels

It is a great idea to have some buss channels set up with common effects such as reverbs and delays.  Not only will this lower your CPU load but it will also help gel together your productions.

As an example. say you wanted a delay from the end of a vocal and also the end of a lead to work perfectly together. If you draw in identical  automation sending the last phase of the vocal and the last note of the lead to a delay buss, both of these will be effected with the same delay settings. The delays will be in time with each other and help gel transitions between your tracks.

My typical template will have 3 different delays, with 3 different settings. How you set this up is completely up to you, but a good starting point would be 3 tape delays – one with  a 1/8 note delay, one with a 1/16 note delay and one with a 1/16 triple dotted delay.

You will remember that I always have my “Side-chain” on bus 1, so I send these to busses 2-4 and name them appropriately.

It’s a good idea to cut the lower frequencies from all your effects busses so that your mixes won’t get muddy from the effect sends.  A quick way to do this is to put a high-pass filter on each of your effects sends and cut below a certain frequency range. 100hz is a good starting point.

On the next three busses I typically use include 3 different reverbs – 1 short, 1 medium size and one large.

The reason it is good to have three different size reverbs set up is because the size of the reverb will work great with some things but not others. For example a small reverb can work really well with the likes of hats and percussion, where as a larger reverb on these will be to over-powering and will make your hats sound washed out. On the other hand, a medium to large one will work better with a vocal, lead or pad sound where you want to add quite a lot of ambiance to that particular sound.  Again make sure you cut the lower frequencies of each channel to keep mudiness out.

One thing worth considering is the number of  models of reverb you choose. While it does make sense to have a single reverb set up to mimic different room sizes, it can often detract from the sense of continuity in your track if you have multiple different reverb types – say from 3 different plugin developers with totally different pre-sets for room size/reflections etc.

Think of it this way – when you hear natural reverb you are in consistent environment. For example, when you go to hear a live gig, each of the musicians is in the same room – so while they have different instruments that would respond to the accoustics of the room in different ways, the overall effect is consistent.

Generally, you will want to get this type of consistent feel in your own tracks, and going with a single reverb with slightly different room sizes/reflection settings on your various busses will help with this.

There are no set rules with this but having things set up will make it easy for you to start with and you can then experiment a little more if you want.

The Importance of Setting up Templates Within Your DAW Part 3

Bus Groups

So far, I’ve been talking about sending individual tracks to various busses to add an effect, but another common use of busses is to add a common effect to multiple channels.

A typical example of this is sending multiple drum channels to a bus to add compression.

You may recall that my setup includes a large number of channels for drum instruments. I will then send each of these instruments out to a single bus with a compressor on it, to compress them all collectively.

Once again, this collective processing helps your tracks have a consistency and in this case helps “glue” your drums together much better than having a completely separate compressor with different settings from all the others on each drum channel.

This doesn’t mean you can’t include a compressor with unique settings on a particular element in case you need to tame some peaks etc – but ultimately sending them all out to a bus with a common compressor will help them gel.

Hopefully this short series on my own template has given you some insight into how to approach setting up your own and encouraged you to start working on that if you haven’t already. A bit of time getting your starting point the way you like it will help you get creating faster and ultimately allow you to tweak your autoload over time as you learn more about engineering/production. In the end you’ll end up with a better sound.

The Importance of Setting up Templates Within Your DAW Part 3

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