The Submix

Peer Review Assignment

By: Sebastian Rios
Hi everyone, Im Sebastian Rios from Arequipa Peru and todays lesson is an
assignment part of the third week of the course Introduction to Music Production at
Coursera.org. Id like to discuss what a submix is and why we need it.

A mix can become very complex, if you were consider a band, they could easily be
two guitars, two main singers, three additional singers, a keyboard, and two basses.
They are ten tracks that you have to mix at once. I dont know about you, but I
would have trouble trying to remember what all those tracks are doing at the same
moment that Im working in the DAW.
The submix is a collection of signal flows bundle together in a way that they can be
edited all at once. In other words, we could say that a submix is a group mix of
tracks combined into one that helps us to adjust the amplitude of the tracks in a
group at the same time, and also we can add effects to all the tracks that are in the
submix.
So in a band, we might take all the guitars and put those to just one fader that we
could bring up and down, adjusting the only the amplitude of the guitars. And the
singers to another single fader that allows us, to adjust only the amplitude of the
voices.
In the end, you are kind of mixing inside the group and then you go over and then
you mix to group all at once. And you kind of mix those submixes.
So you might start with ten tracks but you just end up with just five faders at the
very end. This is really a common procedure when working with the DAW.
The idea of a submix is simplify the work with the mixer, and not only when you
have a lot of tracks. A submix helps us when we want to do the same thing, like
adding effects, moving faders, and many other things else but, it also helps us to
organize all the stuff inside our project.
We need to know how to set up a submix with our DAW. As were setting up a
submix, its going to be using a single bus and the track outputs. So usually, we
would create a bus.
I suggest you to give your buses a good name. Then, we would route the output of
those tracks to that bus. Let me show an example.
In my current FL Studio project, I have organized the kicks and drums into a submix,
so I can easily adjust the fader of all those tracks as you can see in the picture:
ORANGE In the first orange frame, there are the kicks 1, 2, 3, and 4. That are on the
channel numbers 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively and in the channel number 5 we can
see that theres a submix group that covers all the kicks and drums that I have in
the channels 1 to 4. As you can see, in the second frame theres a fader that
controls all the kick faders at the same time.
GREEN In the first green frame, we can see the effect slots that this DAW allow us to
configure in our submix. And, in the second green frame, I opened the Fruity
Reeverb 2 effect that gives to the track a kind of stereo effect, using a reverb and

simulating a specific ambient for that track. Also, you can see that the first effect of
the Drums, KKs submix is the Fruity Reeverb 2 that is in the first slot of the mixer
inputs.

As you can see, a submix is useful for producers and I consider it as the perfect way
to keep all things in the right place. If we organize well our musical project, the
result will be amazing, so well satisfied with what we have just created.
In the picture above, we can say that Kick1, Kick2, Kick3 and Kick4 are in a single
bus called Submix Drums, KKs as it is in the mixer.
So, the independent signal flow of the recordings, are linked to a bus. The bus,
apply all the effects to each element in the submix, and then, the signal flow goes
through the Main Out speakers.