Creating tracks and busses

What are tracks?

A track typically represents a part played with one instrument or sung with voice. That part can start in the very beginning and finish at the very end of a song. Or there can be multiple occurences of that instrument/voice within a song, in which case there will likely be multiple regions, or clips, inside a track.

A region is just a portion of audio or MIDI data. For example, a ‘Lead guitar’ track can have several regions, one per each solo. Meanwhile, a ‘Drums’ track could be just one huge MIDI region spanning the entire song.

An audio track is usually self-contained as it has all the data to play back music. A MIDI track, however, is comprised of instructions that need to be interpreted and executed to provide actual sound to listen to.

A region represents an audio clip, i.e., one of your sound files or just a portion of a sound file. In the image below, the horizontal strip areas marked “MyTrack” and “short-drone-mono” are tracks. The rectangles containing audio information are called regions (for example, the region “wheels-mono.1” is contained within MyTrack).

What are busses?

A bus is similar to a track except that it does not contain its own regions. You cannot record directly into a bus or drag regions into it. However, you can add plugins to a bus and then feed the output of multiple tracks into that bus (see below for details).

A MIDI bus is similar to an audio bus: no regions, just processing incoming stream of data and outputting processed data.

The area marked Master in your session is an example of a bus. Typically every session has a Master bus. All the audio to be exported from your session will be sent to the Master bus.

How are tracks and busses used?

Audio-processing plugins and automation can be applied to both tracks and busses.

Audio tracks can be routed to busses. In fact, many tracks can be simultaneously routed to one bus. busses are traditionally used as a convenient way to apply any kind of signal processing to many tracks at once. For instance, you might find it useful to route all tracks that contain drum sounds to a single Bus that you would call ‘drum bus’. Then, if you decide that all your drum tracks are too loud, you can quickly adjust the level of the ‘drum bus’ rather than adjusting each separate track that feeds into it.

Another use of a bus would be to have a common reverberation plugin, so that any audio track which requires the reverb effect could be routed to a single bus.

Adding tracks and busses

Right-click in the empty area beneath any existing tracks and busses. Alternatively, click on the menu Track > Add track, Bus, or VCA... (Ctrl+Shift+N shortcut). The following window will appear:

Ardour offers different track types depending on the type of data they contain. This tutorial will only cover audio tracks and busses. (see the Ardour manual for details on all track types or their brief explanation in a section below).

Choose Audio tracks or Audio busses to specify whether you want to create audio tracks or busses.

The Add numeric input box lets you specify how many tracks (or busses) you would to like to create.

You can optionally give a Name to the track or bus being created. The Configuration drop-down menu allows you to specify how many channels of audio you’d like the new track or Bus to handle. For example, if you will be recording your voice on this track using a single microphone, choose Mono. If you plan to import a clip from an existing song and place it on this track, choose Stereo. The choice made here will also affect which plugins you can use on the track (mono tracks cannot use stereo plugins and vice versa).

The Position menu lets you choose where you want the new track or bus to be placed: first, last, before or after the selection.

You can safely ignore the other options for now. To learn more about each of them, please check this page of the complete Ardour manual.

Click the Add and Close button to create the tracks or busses you have just configured, and automatically close the Add Track window. The tracks you just created will appear as new rows in the main canvas. If you want to add multiple tracks with different configuration, opt for Add selected items (and leave dialog open) instead.

Other types of tracks and busses

When adding tracks and busses to your project, you’ll see more options available.

Foldback busses are meant for stage monitoring mixes where you might want giving each performer a customized mix that goes right into their earpiece. E.g. more rhythm section and less brass section in the mix for a solo guitarist. See here for more details.

VCA masters are another way to group tracks. These mixer strips provide a single fader for multiple tracks. Please refer to the user manual for more information.

Continuing

Once you’ve added one or more tracks, you will want to put some audio material into them to work with. Continue on to the Importing Audio and Recording Audio chapters to learn how to do this.

Next: IMPORTING AUDIO AND MIDI