I have fond memories of using Buzz Tracker in the 90’s, which was the first software I used that visually mapped out the relationships between instruments, effects, and the overall flow of sound:

The modular nature of this basic but powerful interface introduces the concept of music as graphs, routes and busses, and for its price (free!) was very much ahead of its time, although professionals with access to physical hardware were routing voltages many decades beforehand.

Personally I owe much to this revolutionary piece of freeware software and the logical framework it provided for creativity.

Learning to think of audio in terms of a signal flow has stuck with me through different DAWs and workflows, and given how easy it is to set up a structure I feel that it’s worth sharing the approach with other producers, especially beginners.

More advanced users will undoubtedly have their own preferences and personal workflow, so I can only speak to my own approach here, and as always welcome feedback, tips and tricks in the comments.

But I digress…

Mapping the bus pattern…

This a flowchart of a track I worked on recently in FLStudio. I’ve taken each instrument, mixer routing and automation and splayed it out into a graph.

(A full-size PDF download is available on this link)

Each column represents a stage in the progression from instrument to final mix, and each colour group represents one of the layers of the overall sound.

With only 12 instruments and a small number of automation and effects, this minimalist approach makes it a pretty good candidate for analysing the patterns involved.

The Bus Pattern

The bus pattern is fairly common in electronic music production, in general it looks something like this: