Features

Mixing in software can get confusing, with audio signals being split, combined and ferried about in a maze of virtual cables. The diagram below should make things clearer.

At the top are all tracks that have been recorded, each feeding a mixer channel. These include eight drum tracks - two overheads (combined as a single stereo channel) plus six spot mics on individual drums - four guitar tracks, a keyboard and a vocal. The rhythm guitar part has been recorded twice, with both takes used simultaneously and panned to left and right speakers to create a double-tracked effect.

Various effects plug-ins have been used on different channels. These are called inserts as they are inserted into the signal flow: the clean sound comes in and the effected sound comes out. EQ, compression and distortion would usually be used as an insert effect, as they change the tone of the sound itself.

Each channel also has a stereo pan and volume control and two auxiliary effects sends known as aux sends. These feed a pair of aux effects, shared by all the channels. Having an aux send control on each channel means you can apply varying amounts of the effect to each channel. Reverb and delay are used as aux effects; they add to the sound and don't need to change or replace the original clean signal.

The keyboard and vocal channels are sent straight to the master stereo output, but the drum and guitar channels have been combined into groups (known as buses or subgroups). Doing this has two advantages. Once you have a balanced drum sound, you can adjust the overall volume of the drums using the group fader rather than trying to adjust each drum channel fader individually. Using groups is also useful for applying insert effects to a number of different channels simultaneously. This makes more efficient use of your processing power compared to applying multiple instances of the same effect to lots of individual channels. It can also have sonic advantages for compression and distortion effects where the various sounds interact with each other as they are processed.

The effects we've used are typical of a pop music production, with lots of compressors used for a full-bodied sound. The pan, volume and aux send controls are also typical. However, exact settings will depend on the tone and volume of your recorded sounds.

	1 Effects plug-ins (shown in orange) can be applied to individual channels (blue), groups of channels (red) or as auxiliaries (green).