Studio One: Using The VCA Channel

Here, all the drum channels in a mix have been assigned to a VCA channel (the red fader on the right). Moving the VCA fader will change the levels of all the assigned channels, but unlike with a bus, no audio is routed through it — the VCA simply controls the level of channels assigned to it.

VCA faders offer a powerful way to control your levels in Studio One.

When you have large projects containing many tracks, there comes a point where mixing starts to feel a bit unwieldy. Studio One has a few tools that can help you handle that, such as routing buses and groups. However, there’s another way to take the leg work out of mixing, and that’s through the use of VCA channels. We’re going to look at how the VCA channel could be the secret mixing weapon you’ve never got around to trying.

The easiest way to control multiple sources at once is by having a bunch of channels selected. You can do this by Ctrl‑clicking (Command‑click on Mac) individual channels or Shift‑clicking across a range of channels. With several channels selected, anything you do to one will also be done to the others. The faders and pan controls will move together, the mute and solo buttons all operate at the same time, and routing and effects all get changed together as if they are one channel. All parameters maintain their relationship to each other and are scaled as they move.

You can turn this selection of tracks into a group from the right‑click menu, which means that when you click away from the channels to do something else, the connection between those selected channels is retained. Otherwise, you’d have to keep re‑selecting them.

Grouping channels is certainly useful, but requires a bit of management to be versatile. Maybe you don’t want the panning linked, you might want different effects on different channels, or you just want to group the volume control and nothing else. If you bring up the Groups column to the left of the mixer and right‑click the group in question, you can add or remove various mixer attributes from the group. Another useful tip is that you can hold the Alt (Option) key and move any parameter on a channel within the group without affecting any of the others.

So, the flexibility is there, but sometimes it takes a lot of clicks to get it to be what you need it to be.

Another option is to create a bus and then route your channels to it. This will give you control over the overall volume of those channels. You also have mute/solo control and stereo balance. But this control is applied to the mixed sound of those channels, rather than acting on the channels individually. While that is absolutely useful, it works very differently. You can’t ‘exempt’ channels in the group from pan changes, for example, and if you’ve got any post‑fader effects on the channels being routed to the bus, you’ll still hear them even with the bus fader pulled down.

Both groups and buses have their uses, but throwing in the odd VCA channel can take on some of the heavy lifting and smarten up your mixing in a way that retains the intention of your mix.

VCA...