Organizing a Pro Tools session: Groups or busses?

[AdamWathan]

Just trying to establish a solid workflow in PT and wondering what you guys are doing for stuff like overheads, guitars, bottom and top snare mice, etc.

Are you bussing your L and R overhead tracks to an aux track to apply your EQ and compression as well as control overall level, or do you copy the plugin chains to both tracks and just create a mix group for them to control fader levels together? Same with guitars, do you control overall guitar level with an aux input or create a mix group to just pull all the fader at once? Saaame deal with multi mic'd snare, set relative levels with groups off then use mix group to control level, or buss tracks to an aux?

Also, with edit groups, mix groups and edit+mix groups... Do you create an edit group for all your drums, then mix groups for the stuff you want to control together within the drums or do you just make it an edit+mix group and do it all together like that...?

 

[greyskull]

i make Ohs A stereo track, and the same with double guitars, then if i multi mic, bus them to an aux

 

[Trevoire520]

I make up groups for drums, snares, toms, triggers, guitar mic's, guitar di's, rhythmn guitars, lead vocals, gang vocals.

I also have sub's for drums, drum parallel compression, guitars, bass and vocals, though this is mainly for adding compression/eq rather than for level changes.

It all depends on how you want to work though, I know some guys that like to bus their snare's down to an aux and do their compression & eq there for a more natural sound. I prefer to have more control by doing things seperately.

The thing to remember when using aux's though is that unless you're sending your reverb's from said aux that your reverbs won't change with your changes to the aux fader as they would when changing the level on the audio track.

+1 to doing overheads on a stereo track, saves alot of faffing about.

 

[Forceps]

Hey that's pretty smart, never thought of grouping mono tracks to stereo tracks... like overheads and L-R guitars. I tracked the grunts and screams twice for my current project to give em more body and depth, I can turn them into stereo tracks too. Thanks!

 

[Trevoire520]

Yep, a stereo track only counts as one in pro tools' retarded track limit too

 

[ze kink]

I do a lot of both, especially with drums. I'll also often have plugins on individual tracks and then some more on the buses, again, especially with drums. For guitars, I'll often do all of the adjustments on the bus track, but not always, especially if they have different amps or whatever.

Also +1 on utilizing stereo tracks.

 

[Forceps]

Yep, a stereo track only counts as one in pro tools' retarded track limit too

You serious? Damn, that's gonna save my ass with 14 tracks of drums, 9 tracks of vocals, 2 tracks of bass and about 12 tracks of guitar in one of the songs for my current client...

 

[greyskull]

Yep, a stereo track only counts as one in pro tools' retarded track limit too

thats the other reason i started doing it!!

heres what my mix window usually looks like (in 2 parts. it was a BIG session)

 

[greyskull]

So i bus pretty much everything that has more than one mic on it, and stick the busses to the right of the master fader - much like a proper console. Also when using a control surface - command 8 here, all your tracks that you need to adjust the most are next to each other.

 

[Lasse Lammert]

tons of busses.....

drums for example:
snare orig, snare total, toms, OH, Drums, Drums para.

similar for guits and vox etc.

BUT
I always keep the drumbus-fader around 0....mac 2dB of movements, cause I don't wanna fuck up the dry-to-verb ration from the snare and toms

 

[greyskull]

Yesirreeeee its ALL about bussing.

 

[greyskull]

PLUS in Hd youve got VCA faders as well.. AND trim automation..... gotta get HD

 

[Let it burn...]

I keep most of the thing separate but I buss all the instruments.

Most of the time it's:
DrumAUX
NYDrums
BassAUX
Dirt AUX
Clean AUX
Lead vocal AUX
BV AUX

 

[jval]

OH's on a stereo track like someone mentioned before. If you recorded them to 2 monos, just create a new stereo track and drag both regions into it. I also do that a lot with extra guitar parts, some BGVs.. it's just easier than bussing if you have 2 tracks you're gonna pan out anyways.
Usually group all the drums together and have a drum bus. RH Guitars, buss to an aux so you can still control the L/R balance. Anything else, just depends on the situation.
I should really look into the group capabilities more... some ideas you mentioned were cool... my groups are always mix+edit and I just use them for solo and mute. Starting to use VCA faders tho, pretty handy when you don't want an AUX.

 

[sgt.pepper]

@greyskull: you're using the analog channel on nearly ever channel in pt. do you have a favorite setting you're using all the time? i'm using the le version.

 

[Demonstealer]

I use group tracks

so Snare - with snare top and snare bottom plus a additional drumagog track
Toms - stereo group with all the toms
Overheads - with the overheads (obviously)
Drums - overall, everythign else goes into this so once the drums are balanced i can just treat them as a single element.
Guitars - all guitars go into this
Vocals - all vocals into this, if the song has clean vocals and growled vocals i use 2 separate groups then

For effects I normally have a reverb master bus and if i'm trying to save CPU I even have a default compressor or delays or any other effect tracks.

 

[AdamWathan]

Alright so I set up a massive template last night but found myself running out of busses! I managed in the end but don't have as much submixing control as I was hoping for. Not a big deal though, will just have to reconsider how I am doing things. Instead of having a kick buss, snare buss, etc for combining samples and multiple mics, I will probably just create mix groups and disable the linking of groups between the mix and edit window. Pretty stoked on how it turned out overall though, should be pretty easy to get any sessions rolling now.

Only sort of annoying thing, there's no way to solo an aux track and have it play everything it's being sent without soloing all of the tracks sending to it as well is there? I don't really expect to be able to do this really but I know Logic did it which was handy... Is there an easy way to solo a submix without 25 clicks or do I have to resort to making a mix group for all those tracks and enabling/disabling as required? If that's the case it almost makes sense to not use busses at all to submixing those tracks unless there is group processing I need to do like drumbuss compression... It's just nice having submixes all together in the mix window to adjust the balance between large groups at once like all drums, all gtrs, bass, all vox, etc without having to move all the faders for each element of the submix as I would have to do without the buss.

 

[AudioGeekZine]

command click the Solo button = solo safe
I think that's what you're getting at.

 

[joeymusicguy]

sorry to go off topic here

but can you change pan law in protools?

 

[AdamWathan]

command click the Solo button = solo safe
I think that's what you're getting at.

No sorry you misunderstood, what I mean is this. If I have an aux channel called Drumbus with all my drumtracks bussed to it, I want to be able to hit solo on the aux track and hear just my drums. Instead, I have to hit solo on the kick, kicktrig1, kicktrig2, snare top, snare bottom, snaretrig, tom 1, tom 2, tom 3, overheads, hats, ride, etc. I can group them all yeah and solo them that way, but then what is th point in having an Aux to control overall drum level when all the faders are linked in the mix group anyways? I still hate logic but that was a cool feature. Reaper let's me do it too, with it's track folder structure which I always thought was a brilliant and very intuitive way of handling submixes.