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12. Three routing recipes that offer extra inspiration

1 When applying aux-based processing to a part of your mix, it pays to group the dry and wet signals together afterwards into one bus. A little EQ and compression can be applied to the entire bus afterwards, gluing the dry and wet signals together into one cohesive sound. We’ve done just that with some drums in our tutorial video.

2 After adding two fresh aux returns, we’ve sent our bass to them pre-fader before pulling the volume down to silence. Now we can split the bass apart into lowand high-frequency bands using EQ filters, and then process the parts individually. This allows us to distort the high frequencies without affecting the lower harmonics, for a more controlled sound.

3 If you’ve got a few effects on auxes as part of your mix, try sending the output from one return to the input of another, rather than routing all of them directly to the master bus. By doing this, you can create some interesting and unique sounds as the wet signal from one aux drives the effect on another.