Creating an Alternative Mix Using Busses

 

When you’re creating audio projects, you’re working to create the perfect mix. When you’re recording, you’ll often need to create separate monitor mixes: the performer in the recording booth may need a slightly different mix than you’re listening to in the control room.

When you start a new project, all audio tracks are routed to the master bus. Let’s assume that you’re using the master bus for your main mix. If you have a sound card with multiple hardware outputs, you can create alternative mixes that you can send to hardware outputs without changing your main mix.

For information about using the Mixing Console window to create alternative/cue mixes, please see the Mixing Console online help.

  1. First, go to the Audio Device tab in the Preferences dialog and ensure you have a multiple-output device selected in the Audio device type drop-down list.

  2. First, let’s click the Insert Bus button Vegas Pro b insertbus Creating an Alternative Mix Using Busses in the Mixer window to create a new bus for our alternative mix.

  3. By default, the bus is named Bus A. Let’s double-click the bus label in the mixer window and type “Headphones” in the box to give our bus a more descriptive name.
    Vegas Pro renamebus2 Creating an Alternative Mix Using Busses

  1. Now we need to route our headphone bus to one of our sound card’s outputs.

  1. In the Mixer window, click the playback device selector on the headphone bus control. A menu is displayed that lists all of our sound card’s outputs.
    Vegas Pro choosebusoutput Creating an Alternative Mix Using Busses

  2. Choose the output where you want to send the headphone mix.

  3. Connect the performer’s headphones to the selected output.

  4. Now we need to create our headphone mix.

  1. Click the multipurpose fader and choose Bus A from the menu. All tracks now display a Bus A fader.
    Vegas Pro altmix choosebus Creating an Alternative Mix Using Busses

  2. Drag the fader on each track to adjust the level of the track that is sent to the headphone mix bus. If multiple tracks are selected, you can adjust their bus-send levels at the same time.

    If you want to exclude a track from the headphone mix, just set its Bus A fader to -Inf.

    You can use the bus control in the Mixer window to adjust the level of the headphone mix, add effects to the mix, or mute and solo the mix.

    If you need to create multiple mixes, you can add up to 26 busses to the Mixer window and repeat the procedure described in this topic.

 

 

Creating an Alternative Mix Using Busses