bones wrote:I think you mentioned grouping all your drums in a bus but I don't understand why you would want/need to do that very often. Sure, I've seen them doing mixes in Alberts Studio where all the drums were going into a 16 channel mixer, which in turn fed into the main desk but that was just because they had run out of channels on the main desk, not because there was any advantage in subbing the drums.
Drums is just about the best example for sub-mixing. You don't see it because you don't 'produce' your drum sounds (I think). For you drums is a machine that you plug in, set it's volume in the mix, maybe put a compressor on it. However, with recording acoustic drums you get to handle volume differences between the drum instruments, sometimes need to do some specific processing on the snare or maybe toms and/or cymbals. You work with close-miking (bass, snare, toms) together with overhead-miking (cymbals, etc.). All these parts together make for a complex mix on their own. This is no different when you mich and mach acoustic drum-samples. So when you have all that finely tuned and mixed together as a coherend sounding drumtrack, you seriously want to be able to level that complete drum mix into the total mix with ONE fader and not break up your preciously devised drum-mix by having to move every individual level of each drum-signal.
There are other options to do this besides bussing and probably you didn't notice there was another system acting (again, just assuming things here ). You can do submixing with VCA-inserts or with fader-grouping. Orion doesn't have either so bussing it is
To put things into perspective: VCA-inserts are a Protools thing (I seem to remember), I don't know of another host (including Reaper) that has those. Fader-grouping otoh is something that almost every DAW has but (for now) is absent in Orion as well. Maybe OP8 will have that