Using Aux Busses in Kinetic 2

A new major feature in Kinetic 2 is auxiliary bussing. This will allow you to send the sound of multiple tracks to the same effect. This is a great mixing trick that makes it seem like more than one instrument is playing in the same room. Open the demo project named BuddhaSong.kin by going to File|Open to see this in action.

If you click on Aux 1 you will see a reverb in the Audio FX bin.

Reverb is an audio signal processor that is designed to simulate an acoustic environment. It does this by playing back “echoes” of the input signal as if the sound was bouncing off walls.

Let’s select Groove B5 from the Groove Picker and hit play.

We can tell which tracks are being sent to the Aux 1 reverb by looking at the indicator to the right of the top knob . If the indicator is blue it means that the send is “enabled” and a copy of the signal is being routed to the bus. In this groove those tracks are 1, 3, 5, 6, 7 & 8. If we solo these tracks we will be isolating all the sounds in the “virtual room”. Now we can mute Aux 1 and hear the difference. Double-click the reverb in the FX bin to show the properties window. You can adjust the “Room Size” and “Proximity” to make the effect less subtle. Set them both to 100 for a very extreme echo.

Not only is this a key mixing technique used by professionals all over the world, but it also conserves your computer’s resources. Rather than adding a different reverb on each track you can just route multiple instruments to a bus, leaving your processor free for more FX later.

Keywords: techkb, CWKN, CWKN2, Tip, aux