Mixing Boards/Consoles

Mixing boards or mixing consoles (also called mixing desks, soundboards, or just mixers) allow you to adjust, mix, and route audio streams. They can be analog or digital, and can be physical or virtual (software).

Channels

Each input and its associated controls are referred to as a channel or channel strip. The term also sometimes covers outputs when they have a similar appearance. The channels are typically arranged in single row, with the inputs on the left and outputs on the right, although larger mixers may place the outputs in the middle. This is why they are called channel strips - each channel looks like a vertical strip of tape.

Buses

Some channels are called buses, which is a very generic term but generally refers to channels that are handling groups of inputs...or other buses. For example, the master output channel is often called the master bus, as all the other channels are routed through it before being sent out of the mixer. There may also be an auxiliary (or "aux") bus for an alternative mix. Then there may be buses for certain instruments that require multiple input channels. For instance, drums typically require numerous microphones to capture the entire kit's sound - all those mics are fed into separate input channels which are all routed to a drum bus, where they can be processed together before being output to the master bus. This makes it much simpler and quicker to adjust the volume of the drum kit as a whole, for example.