Academy Dashboard › Forum › Production › Mixing › Can we talk about the master bus chain, please? › Reply To: Can we talk about the master bus chain, please?
Jason DavenportHi Lisa,
The "Master Bus" is what all your other busses output to. In other words, your mix starts as individual tracks, then you might output similar ones to a stereo bus(for instance a drum bus where all of your drum tracks are summed to a stereo bus) Then you would output that to the master bus along with your other instrument busses. That final bus, or master bus, is your entire mix summed to a single stereo file. Some people call it a "mix bus", some call it the "two bus" all meaning the same thing.
The idea of having a chain on your master bus is to simulate "mastering". In this chain, you might find a compressor(I like the Waves SSL G Comp for this), an Eq(Pultech or something similar to boost low end, and high end), possibly a de-esser, tape emulation, etc... The last thing in most master chains would be a limiter to get the levels up.
In my DAW(Sonar Platinum) when you open a new project, it automatically creates a master bus that all of the tracks output to. Not familiar with Studio One, but I bet the default project has similar routing.
Hope this helps shed some light on the subject for you!