Six template tactics to speed up grouping

Here’s how the professionals turn their workflow nuclear by taking advantage of bussing tactics

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A standard approach when creating DAW templates is to set up commonly-used subgroups – drums, vocals, bass, and so on. Expand upon this by creating more focused groups that channel into those main buses: for example, ‘kick’, ‘snare’, hi-hat’ and ‘perc’ buses that then feed into your master ‘drums’ group.

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Depending upon how you work, you might want to group a track’s signals by frequency content. So your hi-hats and sparkly FX might be better routed to a ready-to-go ‘treble’ group, while your kick and sub bass go to a ‘low frequency’ group. This way, you can refine the tonal balance of the mix per group.

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Instead of grouping by frequency, you may wish to funnel sounds together that sit in a similar range of dynamics. For example, plucky hi-hats and transientheavy elements go to a ‘sharp’ bus, but washy pads and squashed ride layers may go to a ‘flat’ group. This helps keep more of a handle on dynamics.

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In many DAWs, parallel processing can be a pain to set up on the fly. Bypass this hassle by factoring in this routing within your DAW template. Set up a ‘parallel compression’ group channel, then send this signal to an aux containing your favourite compressor.

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Another pro trick is to set up a ‘Render’ group bus, with its output routed to a spare audio channel. Then, when you want to bounce a combo of signals to audio, you only need to route them to the ‘Render’ track and record onto the audio track. Easy!

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Finally, it can be a good idea to pre-route all track signals to a final ‘Premaster’ group channel. This way, you can apply master processing to the entire track, but leave your master bus free – that way, any reference tracks in the project can be routed straight to the master out, avoiding your master processes.