Before I explain how to add and setup a sub mixing bus in Ardour, I must explain how it’s useful. My particular usage was to control the volume of multiple drum tracks. The bus basically allows you to affect or mix multiple tracks instead of doing them all individually. Another use case would be to add audio effects to multiple tracks, like reverb.

So, to add an audio bus in Ardour you add a audio bus track just as you add other tracks. Something to notice is that it automatically has the track set to mono, but I changed it.

Here is what it looked like on my mixer window. As you can see I had four different drum tracks that I was trying to mix together. On the end there is the audio bus that I added.

If you click on Window -> Tracks and Busses you can bring up the routing grid for all the tracks and busses. All you have to do to connect the tracks to the bus is disconnect them from the Master in, and reconnect them to the name of your Bus in. You also have to connect the bus to the Master in so it actually outputs audio. Below you can see my tom drum connected to the bus, and I just did that for the rest of my tracks.

I used Ardour for the first time the other day. Really, I have downloaded it before, but upon opening it I came to the resolution that it was to complicated as I couldn’t get any audio to be produced. It has been a year or so now, and I have come to want the use of a fully functional DAW. After some research I found out how to do basic audio routing and got sound to be produced! It turns out it isn’t really that hard. Last time I was grappling with using JACK and Ardour together, which would make it have lower latency, but it adds to a beginners confusion.

I only spent a few minutes, as you can probably tell with the audio clipping. Anyways, my main reason for wanting to use Ardour is the recording ability. I was previously using LMMS which is great for making synth tracks, but live music incorporation was just to much work. I was also using Audacity, but it didn’t seem to have easy incorporation of MIDI instruments. I will go over them in later posts as they are still very good applications.

After just a little bit of playing around I was able to get MIDI instruments working. I downloaded the Black Pearl Drum-kit, and was able to get it working easily.