Submix Concept

Hello! My name is Marcos Cirino and I am taking this class in order to further my understanding of music. I have an alternate rock band called 23rd street and we are current,y recording original songs, so I am also taking the course to help in the production process. I will be talking here about the submix concept.

One function of a Bus is to provide a way in which you can combine multiple audio tracks and send to a single location. This is known as creating a submix.

Let's say for example, that you have recorded drums using multiple microphones (Kick, Snare, Hi Tom, Floor Tom, Overheads , etc.) and you’d like to combine them all into one stereo track. 

The idea of using submixes, in general, is to group things that belong together. So, you can submix background vocals, doubled acoustic guitar parts, or in an orchestral setting you might want to create a different submix for brass, woodwinds, strings, percussion, etc.

The benefits of using the Bus system in your DAW for submixing as described above are many. It gives you the ability to simplify extensive track counts into fewer faders for a more manageable and easier mixing process. 

Naming each bus (or submix) is encouraged in order to avoid issues caused by unintentionally routing different tracks to the same Bus.

The basic steps to creating a submix are as follows:

1. Create an Aux Input Channel and name it.

2. Choose the input to the Aux input.

3. Make the outputs of the channels match the input of the Aux input channel. 

Sources:

http://mixcoach.com/mixing-tools-bus-part-1-submix/