Hi! I recently purchased a digi-003r with protools and have been making considerable progress learning the software but am now trying to understand and implement sends and busing.

Can you point me in the right direction with suggested reading material, I would be most grateful.

Thanks Leagh

Leagh, thanks for the question. A good resource for general recording techniques is:

Modern Recording Techniques, Sixth Edition
For ProTools specifically:

Pro Tools 101

Pro Tools 101 Official Courseware, Version 7.4

Pro Tools 7 for Macintosh and Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)
for a quick reference.

I’m not sure if you have a grasp of how sends and busses are implemented in general so I apologize if some of this post tells you what you already know.

In brief sends allow you to make copies of channels and busses let you collect those copies and sum (add) them together. The master fader in Pro Tools (and on any console virtual or real) is the last bus in the chain and adds all things sent to it together. Some other common uses for sends and busses are to send copies of multiple channels to the same effect (on a single bus) on a DAW this can help save precious RAM and CPU resources, they are also sometimes used to make groups and stems when mixing.

In ProTools it is important to understand the difference between and insert and a send. Inserts grab the recorded audio send it to the plug-in and return the result right back to the channel (often to the next insert in the channel). Inserts work from top to bottom so the order does matter. This lets you decide for instance if you would like to compress a signal first and then EQ or vise-versa.

Sends on the other hand offer some more functionality. First of all they come in two flavors Pre-Fader, and Post-Fader. This means you can take your copy before the inserts and the fader (meaning the send level is independent of the channel fader), this is called Pre-Fader. A post fader send takes a copy from after the fader meaning that the level sent depends on the channel fader. Both flavors also offer a send level and panning if appropriate.

Pre-Fader sends are helpful when you are trying to mix wet and dry components of a signal. The signal with no processing (dry) is available pre-fader, you could then send that signal to say a chorus effect on a bus and return that bus to the master fader or mix bus.

Busses act much like and audio channel in Pro Tools except their input comes from sends rather than reading from an audio file. They are useful to collect groups of sends (or single sends) and apply processing across all of the signals sent to the bus. Note you can send the output of channels to a bus as well, but in that case the signal is only going to the bus and not the designated output (typically the master fader) and the bus.

Implementation in Pro Tools is quite simple. Create an AUX channel and set it’s input to bus or busses (say 15-16). Then use the sends from the desired audio channels (Pre or Post Fader) to send to the same bus/busses (15-16). You can actually rename the busses in the I/O setup of ProTools to make life easier. Instead of seeing busses 15-16 on the drop down menu you could see something useful like “Long Reverb.”

Hopefully this answers you question and in a timely fashion.

Cheers-
Ian