What is the purpose of a "Drum Mix" channel?

In the DnB Tutorial and many others I have seen the use of a separate audio track that takes in audio from another audio track before sending it to the master.br
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For example if you had a kick audio track and a snare audio track you would create a third audio track named “drum mix”.br
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You would then send the audio from the kick and the snare directly to the drum mix and then send the audio of the drum mix to the master.br
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What is the purpose of doing this routing? I have seen it more than a few times but it has never been explained as to why it was being done. Additionally, in what instances would you choose to utilize the technique?br
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Thanks in advancebr
Gregg

It’s called grouping or sub mixing. It can be used to apply an effect to a group of tracks.br
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It’s used a lot to apply a compressor to drums to get them to gel together as a unit.br
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You might also us it for synths vocals or whatever.br
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The other advantage is when you your main sections grouped and sounding good it makes mixing much easier as you are only working with a few groups.

Thanks a lot for that but it leaves me with just one more question. I can’t speak for any other DAW but ableton has a built in group feature. Yet I have seen the same routing technique used in ableton. So I suppose my question is, is there any difference as far as the sound you can achieve when choosing to use a regular group over using the routing technique? Or is it just two different ways to achieve the same effect.br
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Thanks again you really helped clear things up.br
Greggbr
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[quote]phil johnston (23/01/2013)[hr]It’s called grouping or sub mixing. It can be used to apply an effect to a group of tracks.br
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It’s used a lot to apply a compressor to drums to get them to gel together as a unit.br
br
You might also us it for synths vocals or whatever.br
br
The other advantage is when you your main sections grouped and sounding good it makes mixing much easier as you are only working with a few groups.[/quote]br
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Ableton groups was only introduced in version 8 so could be just old habits doing it manually. Technically you get the exact same results.