Mixer Channel Strip Creation

Apologies in advance if this has been answered somewhere else but I couldn't find it. I'm new to recording and Logic and just bought Dave's 10.4 book to get the lay of the land. Under pressure to record a song for a June 5th wedding and concerned with the automatic creation of channel strips in the mixer. So far I've only created two software drum tracks but that has resulted in the automatic creation of multiple channel strips in the mixer, including buses, and I have no idea of their purpose. Is this normal - the creation of the strips that is, not the fact that I have no idea what they are? I'm concerned that when it actually comes time to mix there will be so many strips that the task will be quite difficult and would feel better if the mixer strips only reflected the tracks but maybe that concern is unwarrented?

Unwarranted, especially if they're tracks of drum sets, which in turn often use discrete tracks for individual components of the drum set. Buses are used to route (AKA "send"—important because that's the word you see in the mixer) audio to auxiliary tracks for processing in different ways. If you're using presets, a lot of them will have one or more buses included to add things like delay or reverb.

 

If you're under that sort of timeline pressure, maybe GarageBand would be easier to start with, and then you can get back to exploring Logic on June 6th? Pick up right where you left off in GarageBand, even.

Thanks for the reply. So it sounds like it is normal for multiple channel strips to be created for built in plug ins associated with the drum tracks. Are there any downsides to using GB instead of Logic, such as getting to the final mixed down MP3?

It's very normal for them to get added when using patches. GarageBand is basically Logic Lite: a little more straightforward, a little less feature-equipped. Both can bounce audio as AIFF, WAV, or MP3, so there's no concern there.

Thanks for the reply. So it sounds like it is normal for multiple channel strips to be created for built in plug ins associated with the drum tracks. Are there any downsides to using GB instead of Logic, such as getting to the final mixed down MP3?

In my 10.4 Logic Pro X book, this phenomenon is explained in step 7 of the exercise titled "Using a Patch from the Library", on page 204.

 

What happens is, when you choose a patch in the Library, Logic creates the channel strip for your patch plus a couple of Auxiliary channel strips to add two different Reverb effect. You are correct that if you load multiple patch and they each load two Auxes for their own reverbs it will become unmanageable comes mix time. At the bottom of the next page (205) I have shared a TIP for avoiding this behavior and loading only the 1 channel strip you need for your patch without the Auxiliaries: At the lower left of the Library, from the Action menu, choose Enable Patch Merging. Then deselect the Sends button: