Setting Up Busses
Introduction
In this tutorial we will be looking at ‘bussing’, for those who are not familiar with the term, it basically refers to a number of signals being routed together so they can be adjusted or have effects applied to them as a group.
For this tutorial we will be working in the common production situation of routing a number of vocal tracks to a single fader so that effects and level adjustments can be applied in one place. While this tutorial in particular will reference using vocal tracks, the same process can be used within your Pro Tools session on anything you like whether it be to create a drum bus or even a sub-master fader to control the level of your mix before it hits the master fader…
Why Use Busses?
Bussing can have a number of benefits to your production, sessions that feature a lot of tracks can be hard to control so you need to use every trick possible to help you throughout the process. Imagine you have set the levels of each of your vocal tracks but you then decide that all of the vocals tracks need to be quieter within the mix, you can either go through the hassle of grouping the tracks together and then ungrouping them when you want to make individual adjustments, or, you could simply send them to a bussed fader from which you will have an overall control to make any group adjustments you require.
Take the same situation, you have a number of vocal tracks within a session but you feel that they all need a little reverb to help them sit a little better in the mix, rather than wasting valuable processing power applying the effect to each individual vocal track, you can simply bus send them to an effects channel and apply the effect once instead.
Now that we know what it is and how it will benefit your sessions, let’s have a look at setting it up within Pro Tools…
I/O Setup
Let’s start by creating and labelling the bus. As per usual, all things to do with routing within Pro Tools will involve starting work in the I/O Setup window which can be found under the Setup menu as shown below.

Navigate to the Bus tab at the top of the window which will display all available busses in your current session, it is worth mentioning at this point that the number of busses available will differ between systems, an expanded HD system will offer more busses than that of an LE system for example.

We will now create the bus, this can range from a mono bus all the way up to a surround bus (depending on your system) but for the purpose of this tutorial we will combine a number of panned mono vocal tracks so we will therefore use a stereo bus. Choose a spare slot in the bus window, assign its channels (they will be set to one mono track for the left and right sides by default – as below) and then label it appropriately.

Quick Tip: The bus names can be changed by double clicking on the text field
Creating The Bus Input
We now need to create the track which will receive the signals we are going to send via the bus. For this we will use an Auxiliary Input Track; from the Track menu select ‘New…‘ and then choose the settings as shown below.

Quick Tip: The new track dialogue window can also be opened using the shortcut Command_Shift_N (mac) Control_Shift_N (windows)

Please note that for this tutorial we are using a stereo bus so will therefore require a stereo auxiliary track, if you were working with a number of mono signals which were not panned, then a mono bus and mono auxiliary track would work fine.
Routing To The Bus
Now we are simply left with the task of routing the required tracks to the newly created aux track. Remember that bus that we set up right at beginning in the I/O setup window? Well this is where that will finally come in to play…
Set the Input of the newly created track to the bus you created earlier as shown below. This will mean that every track sent to the bus is recieved on this track. For session management purposes, let’s also rename the auxiliary track to ‘Vocal Bus’.

Now lets look at sending our vocal tracks to the ‘Vocal Bus’ track.
As you can see in the screenshot below, I have four vocal tracks in this session which I have routed to the vocal bus, all I needed to do was change the output of the vocal audio tracks to the bus created earlier and the signals will now route through the vocal bus track.

Quick Tip: You can quickly assign the output to a number of tracks by selecting them, and then setting the output of one of the selected tracks while using the shortcut Option_Shift (mac) Alt_Shift (windows).
Making Use Of The Bus
So there you have it you have created and applied a bus within Pro Tools, as mentioned at the beginning of this tutorial, this will now allow you to control the level of the combined bussed tracks from a single fader. You can also add effects to the auxiliary bus fader which will be applied to all sounds routed through it, it is worth mentioning that any insert effects placed on the original audio tracks which have been routed through the bus will be sent as well.
Final Words
We hope you have enjoyed this tutorial and that it will help you during your future productions. Please leave a comment below telling us how you have used bussing in your session or tweet us on our Twitter account.
Thanks for a great article. Just wanted to clear my doubt. If I send mono track to a stereo bus there is a level drop of 2.5dbfs. So how to manage that please ? Thanks in advance.
Thanks for the article, it’s really useful. One thing I am a bit confused with and I’m hoping you could clarify is this. I’ve set up a bus for my vocals and routed them all to an aux channel and added a reverb effect – I now want to add more effects, like an auto-tune for example, would I set up a separate channel for this or use the same one as the reverb?
I hope that makes sense and you are able to help. Many Thanks, John
Very helpful, simply informative tutorial. This helped me during mastering of a previously mixed session, particularly in the use of compression and minor level editing. Thanks very much.
This helped a lot. I’m only discovering how effective using busses in a mix can help.
Great info! For us newbies, the Input on the Vocal Bus Aux track is set to Vocal Bus, but what is the Output suppose to be set to? On the Vox tracks, you have the Output set to Vocal Bus, but your pic shows the Input as “no input”. What is the Input supposed to be set to? Sorry for the lack of knowledge. Thanks.
Hi Tom, no problem at all!
So for example you set up say three vocal audio tracks and record your three singers, those tracks now no longer require an input so you can set them to no input (should you wish).
We then want to route all these vocal tracks to one place so we could for example place a reverb on them as a single group. We set the outputs of these three track the Vocal Bus, so we now have all the signals routed to one place together but to actually use that signal we have to pull it in somewhere, this is where we create our Aux tracks and set the input as the Bus, this brings the signal in onto that channel for us to use.
Hope that helps make a little more sense?
Thanks!
Fantastic little tutorial ive just started using protools 11 with an mbox pro and all is great i was wondering how to set up and use busses and this has helped a great deal saves alot of hassle when you have mtiple tracks of vocals or instruments etc.
Brilliant i have one question is occaisionally i get cpu overload when starting playback even with a few tracks that dont have a lot on would i need to set buffering or something like that your help would be great otherwise keep up the great work with these tutorials they are really helpful.
Glad to hear we have helped! 🙂 within the settings -> playback engine there is a buffer setting, try to increase that and see if it helps, keep in mind that the higher the buffer setting, the higher amount of lag you may encounter when recording.
Hope that helps!
What should my playback engine be set on?
Hi,
Playback engine settings really come down to the performance you would like from your system. Increasing the buffer size for example will give you a more stable playback but will also come with the issue of lag on your inputs when recording. Things like CPU usage can of course be upped but that comes at the cost of putting pressure on your system which could result in unstable crashes.
Each of the values and options can be found in the Pro Tools documentation which may help you further?
Thanks!
First off thanks for the great articles, im enjoying them:) im new to this thing and am trying to record a video with quicktime while using audio from my eleven rack instead of the built in mic. For some reason with the protools aggregate io selected as an input in quicktime I have no signal coming in therefore i downloaded sunflower and am using that as medium between quicktime and pro tools. Theproblem is that since i am not using thr main out i cannot monitor what im playing, i thought bussing would solve my problem but it seems i can only send one track via the bus to aux (which goes to the main out)! Can you point what im doing wrong?
Also one curiosity, why the need for the bus when you can send the track directly to the aux input?
Thanks again
Hi Owen,
Great to hear you like the website and thanks for stopping by! I’m a little confused what you mean in both questions in all honesty. In response to your first questions (which I can’t say I have much experience with in terms of recording through soundflower) I would start by taking a look at your I/O setup and see your routing options there perhaps if you cannot record through your main output? In answer to your second question I presume you are asking as to why I set the output of the tracks to an Aux track as opposed to using Aux sends? The reason is so that busses tend to be used to effect a number of tracks together and don’t normally need to be sent elsewhere as well, so routing them all directly to an aux track gives them one destination from which they can all be processed.
Hope this helps a little and is what you were aiming at!
Thanks
After doing this, my panning is no longer working. Some tracks panned Left or Right are now Centered. How do I fix this?
I’m using Ozone Reverb and Exciter plugins and separate AUX tracks for each.
Hi Jay,
Could you explain a little more about your issue? What tracks you have (and mono/stereo) and what is routed where?
It sounds as if you are trying to bus a load of tracks to one which has those effects on if I’m correct?
Thank you and we will try our best to help out.
I have done all these but my aux track faders are greyed out so I am not getting signal into them. I have PT 10
Thanks,
Michael
Hi Michael,
Greyed out faders usually mean that they are inactive so they will not take or process any signals, have you tried right clicking the track and making them active again?
Let us know how you get on.
All The Best