Like schoolchildren fighting

One of the great advantages of routing a number of signals to a bus is that you can then treat all of those signals in one place.

For example, if you have all of your drum tracks routed into a bus, you can put a compressor on that bus, and it will compress all of them together.

And here’s a good way to think about why that can be an excellent thing to do. When a bunch of different signals are in a bus together, and there is a nonlinear treatment of some sort on that bus — compression, limiting, saturation, distortion, etc — the tracks will push each other out of the way moment by moment, like schoolchildren fighting to be first in line.

This constant dynamic interaction can make music very exciting and fun to listen to!

This is why it’s a very common thing to put a compressor on your master bus — so all the sounds in your entire song interact a bit.

Last one’s a rotten egg — jamie