This week’s topic isn’t that sexy, but patch busses are an important and interesting part of Mainstage 3, and can solve a lot of small problems. 

First, the basics: a patch bus is different from a mixing bus in that it only is part of the patch you’ve selected, and you can’t route signals to it from other patches. If you’re unclear on what a bus is, check out this link and read the whole thing- it’ll get you up to speed with basic mixing. 

Here’s how to insert a patch bus into your patch: 

1. Open Mainstage. Select a project. 

2. Select a preset, then under “sends” click the blank space, and then select “patch bus”. 

Here are a couple of situations where patch busses would be very useful: 

• Sending all your effects to a time synced delay. By keeping the bus in your patch, it’ll stay in tempo with the master tempo of the patch. 

• Using it as a group volume control. Route the output of all the channel strips in your patch to a patch bus, and you can control the volume of all channel strips with a single fader, or even apply effects like reverb and delay to just the channel strips in your patch.