Lessons

Lesson Info

Bouncing in Superior Drummer

So now one of the really cool features and sort of the final feature. The last step in your superior journey is the bounce feature. So let me talk to you about what bouncing is. It's a very, very familiar term. If you're coming from the recording side of things or an engineer, you're ultimately going to take what superior drummer has performed for you, and you're gonna take it from MIDI, which is the notes right on the line, and you're gonna bounce it toe audio. Very simple, Rick. Why would you do that? Well, there's a number of reasons. First of all, once you've bounced something out of superior drummer and you have the audio files you're not using all that memory and CPU allocation in superior drummer audiophiles going to take up far less processing power and allocation in your daughter than our software will. Because our software is continually thinking and being intelligent, you're also going to have some folks that like the idea of having a committed audio track to work with, and ...

I know it sounds old fashioned, but there are still lots of songwriters and producers and engineers that when they're mixing or when they're working with a track, they don't want to look at dots on a grid. They don't want to worry about a virtual instrument they want to be as old school, for lack of a better term is, you could get have all audio files. So superior accommodates that and one of the original reasons again, even going back to superior one. A lot of these features and functions are set up to accommodate, for the fact that maybe you don't have is powerful computer as I have. Maybe you have something that's a little bit older or your Daw uses much more memory. There's all kinds of variables when you start putting software together, and we want to make sure that you can still get the best experience out of the program in one way or another, based on what you have available. So very simply put, if I go to the balance page, which I could quick, I'm going to get a dialogue. But before I do that, I want to explain a couple of things that you can set up settings wise in the bounce so that when you actually do what you don't have to worry about anything. So again, the first thing we talked about was the bounce, splits, stereo. So what does that mean? Um, the bounce will split your stereo files. Very simple. So you have a stereo file that's right and left. You'll get a file for the right channel file for the Left Channel. You have just It's each channel will have its own audiophile. Very simple. You can. And again if you enable anything, it'll give you the dialogue when you restart. But you can have that be exactly how you want it to be. Keep intermediate balance, which we're gonna talk about in a second record started. Mitty. We talked about this a little earlier. So, for instance, let's look at my session and will come back to superior right now. My MIDI starts right at the beginning of the session, right? The whole session is so records started. Midi ultimately is for people that necessarily don't have their MIDI start at the beginning. Let's say that I had a whole two or three bars of just instrumental before the midi started. When I enable that feature the bounce that you'll see isn't going to start recording the audio until it gets to the very first Midi note. It won't have all that extra space at the beginning in my imaginary session. So if my session doesn't have that enabled, it will start even recording to bounce the mini at the very beginning, where there is no midi. So again when you look at it and I know it's a little confusing, it'll make more sense when you see the bounce page. When you look at it, record starts. It may just remember that this means during the bounce it won't start bouncing your file until the very first many notes starts. It could be very useful for people that don't want all that extra space or any dead space at the beginning of a recording, because when you balance out of superior German, you create the audio file. If their space before your MIDI groove starts and you don't have this selected, it will record all that blank space, then you'll have to line it up afterwards. The audio where it goes makes sense. Everyone with me. Okay, Force Cashman. We've talked about that default. No visual hits. It looks like we've talked about everything else. Okay, So let's go to the bounce menu, All right, so in the balance menu you'll notice a very, very kind of interesting dialogue. It'll say samples recorded. We haven't recorded anything yet. So how a balance works is very simple. And the reason we do it at the end is because you need to have your idea finalized or there's really no point. So I have that many group that plays that's less than a minute long. What this is going to do is it's going to record that many groove, and it's gonna process that many groove and split the audio out, depending on how I have programmed it to split the audio out. So this is kind of cool so I can bounce through the mixer. Now if I check that everything that I have applied in the mixer in Superior Drummer is going to be a part of that balanced file, does that make sense? So where does that really come in when you have bus routing and things going to other places in the mixture is gonna route through the mixer to record everything, so follow me on it so you don't have to have that check. You can turn all the bleed on or split direct from bleeding. Okay, so you can actually, if you have all the bleed turned on when your microphone, let's use your snare the top snare channel when that records. If you have all bleed on as it renders that mixer track, all the bleed that you have on and that channel will be recorded to that channel will be permanent will be like a real recording. You record a snare drum in a studio. There's bleed. It's captured in the microphone. It's captured the tape approach. However, that's very, very cool. That's very much like old school recording. Split direct from Bleed is more Star Trek. So this is It's very important that you understand what this does, cause this could drive some people crazy if you enable split direct from bleeding. What you're basically telling that bounce function is that every channel is going to take the direct signal for let's use our snare example snare top, and that's gonna be one audio channel. And then every single component of bleed that you have enabled in that channel is gonna be rendered as its own audio channel. So If you have 13 bleed channels on your one snare channel, it's not just gonna render your one snare channel. It's gonna render every single component of the bleed as 13 other audio tracks that you can then either blow your brains out with over the fact that you have way too many individual bleach channels or mixing anyway want you. So this is going to take up some time and some space, because again, the longer your groove is, the longer this balance is. So make sure before you turn that on, you understand that. For instance, if you turn on an ambient channel and you have all the bleed on every single component of the bleedin, that channel will print as its own audio file. Now that's designed. A lot of people just got excited to like That's awesome because they want drum tracks to mix to the perfect drum sound. And I'm with that. If that's you, you've been blessed. Go forward, you know how to do it. But that's exactly what's gonna happen. And don't expect it to be a very quick process, either. It's gonna take a few minutes now over here with split microphone. This is an option that changes depending on what library you're actually bouncing from. Does that make sense? Yes. So every STX is its own studio. Every option is gonna be slightly different. So in the instance were in here click to select. I can select the overheads for this option. What? That means I'm not gonna do it, cause I would. It's just not my thing. But what it means is, if I select this right now, when I bounce everything that would be recorded in the overhead mic channel, which is a stereo channel so that you know, if I have everything that's in there, Tom Cymbals snare everything else that's going to get its own audio channel in the balance as well. So this is ideal for people for like, Well, I want my own audio channel for the ride because we generally don't like the rides by themselves as part of the overhead. Well, here you go. You select that option when you're bouncing and you'll have an audio channel that just has the ride Cymbal on it as was captured by the overhead. But it would just be the ride with none of the other symbols. Now again, as we're doing this and as I'm explaining it, I know that it sounds like, Well, yeah, that's awesome. That's incredible. That's how it should be. I want you to stop and think about the complexity of what I just said to you. I mean, we're literally giving you audio options that again don't exist outside in the real world in any sort of recording medium whatsoever. This is an incredible opportunity to really again if you think you have a great drum sound already, this is just processing things that have happened in superior. We haven't even gotten to bringing the audio back in and then using it with your plug, injured or anywhere. So again, you can come in here and change the premix or volume, and this is relative. So, for instance, it's a universal control, but it's applying this universal control in a relative fashion. It doesn't make everything zero or everything. Four point, It's okay. You're gonna bring the whole thing down to its relative volume. That should make sense to people since the drum set right. It wouldn't make sense if all of a sudden the premix or volume was zero, and every fader came up to zero and everything was the same level. That would be horrible. It's going to bring everything down in according level. It's sort of like when you have a mixed group in pro tools and you bring the fader down, everything comes down accordingly. If you don't understand any of this terminology again, there's a lot that I really it's not my my world in my life to tell you about how to use your dog. But if there's some questions that you're formulating, why I show you this, think hard and we'll try and answer as many as possible. Let's bounce something so you can see what it looks like. So the first step is you have to record enable because it's ultimately going to be recording this performance right now. Bounced through mixer. I'm going to do that because these are two different types of things that happened. But I want to show you something in the settings that we talked about two and explain it. So I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna bounce so as I do my thing, Okay, I didn't get everything. I stopped it, but see what happens here. I just want to kind of show you. I don't think I need to go through it as we are recording. This is telling me how many samples are recorded now. The reason I did it in the reason I stopped is because there's a feature I need to go back and show you that can make this even cooler. Remember again, Let's close this. How yesterday again, I'm sorry that we keep going back. But I told you the beginning. It all works together. Remember yesterday You look at that Holy crap. That's already too many samples. We said that once you have your finalized groove, we're in that position now in a doll where we've got our groove, we've got how it is. We can actually clear our memory. We can cash it and then we can play the group. Now it's gonna find all these things. But as it's playing, remember in cache mode it's on Lee loading all the sounds and articulation we're actually using. You hear all the audio skipping in and out, and you will as its searching for what it wants, but look at the difference. So far. Okay, It's coming into a different group, so it's got some different articulations. It's a little skipping. Don't think that it's crazy. It needs to do that. It's going to do it again. Okay, so we're building. Can I need this articulation? I need this articulation. It's going to come to the last component. Hey, needed all that right now. It's getting smoother and smoother. It's like, OK, we have this. Okay, now look at my memory. Look it now 122 megs. I basically lost 300 megabytes of unneeded, unwanted on used articulations and sounds, and that translates again cause it's my final. This is what I'm doing. This is the final get go. So now I have streamlined this even Mawr, so that as I'm rendering stuff again, all of the audio that's loaded that's being used should be being used. So while you're here, that's what that function is for, which is a beautiful thing. So not only am I in 16 bit mode, but now I'm cashed and I'm only using Ah, 120 is at eight, yet it's an 828 megs off the memory where it's expecting me to use 400. That's a pretty huge, substantial difference. And again, if you're doing this already in conjunction with other things in your Daw, this is a huge step. So now when you go to bounce and you record enable right, we can see already where we're going. Got to go through the whole thing. I should point out that when you bounce, it's really time. It's not off line. It's not a process that happens without going through everything because it's literally recording what's being played. Okay, recording, recording. Don't forget the cow about. That's the most important part. Okay, it's gonna give you a dialogue. You just captured everything you stopped and it's going to say, OK, bro, where do you want? And it's going to say, bro, because that's how it talks. That's whenever superiors talking to you in your mind? No, that it's calling you bro. And maybe even brought sometimes depending on where you are in the country. So it's gonna ask you where you want to save all these audio files. Um, I would recommend creating a folder somewhere. You can find it immediately, Um, and we'll call this one files and will create that, and it's right here. And then we'll click on that. Open that and you see right now that it's bouncing. So the actual physical process of rendering the files would be what we call offline. It's happening quicker than it would if you had to listen to everything, but it's still a lot. Does that make sense? Everyone's with me. Okay? Were there were there. It's going. It's going, It's going, It's beautiful. It's wonderful. You love it. It's got to keep going. There's more stuff. It's got to do again. A lot of people get real, like how come it's not done? The quick answer bra is because it's not just let it do its thing. You're gonna be happy when it's all said and done, so you can obviously see that you have all these options going. If all this stuff happening, you can actually kind of watch what it's rendering. Okay? And again, just to point out, this is not bouncing anything through the mixer and pro tools. So nothing that's happening in pro tools right now, if I've got all the individual channels coming through and I've got like I showed you have got a couple of instances of easy makes. None of that stuff is affecting this at all. Does everybody understand that? It's just bouncing directly from the superior mixer? Cool. Okay, now what happens? Well, what's do this? Let's save this. Let's close this session. Open a new session, and let's bring our audio in its 2 30 to bid for one. Okay, Great. Uh, audio will call this just for the sake of audio. Okay? And then all I'm going to do now is, um, a new track. Let's get a master fader like we've talked about, and then we're going to bring in that groove that we just listen to. Um, that's not really master one. It's just the master. I don't know that it's number one. That's pretty boisterous. Let's import some audio. So let's go here and import audio. And then we know we save that in this files folder, right? So we have a bunch of stuff that we can do here, So let's just get all this right at it, okay? Yes. Add add. Everyone sees that's what we're doing. Done one new tracks for everything. All audio. Yeah. So now you're asking yourself I have some questions because I thought it didn't have anything to do with Pro Tools Mixer. And it doesn't. Doesn't it all you say? But there were way more channels in the superior mixer there were, but I actually had it bounced through the mixer, meaning it followed my output routing. So since I had routed all those channels from superior to pro tools, it followed the combination of routing that I did. Does that make sense to everybody? So there is a way where you can basically just get the tracks the way they look exactly in the superior mixer, which would be to not bounced through the mixer. So had I checked an option and this is work. It's a little heavy against it Will just kind of solo in kind of here. Kind of nice, right? Got your snare. You do you want to? You got your please right. You've got options. Is that better? I don't know. It's how you work. There's no right or wrong. So let's go back to the original session. Um, close this guy here and let's go to where we were. I want to show you a really cool feature and sort of explain how the bounce works so that you can understand how you kind of get the most out of it. We could have made that a much more complicated balance. And when I say complicated, all I mean is there could have been a lot more things bounced. So when you're in superior, you'll remember we had the setting that is, um, keep intermediate bounce. So what is an intermediate bounce? Well, let's go back to the bounce menu. When you're in the menu, you've got bounced through mixer, which is going to follow all the routing, which is what I did. If you don't select that, you're going to get a version off the superior mixer the way it exists in the session. Meaning all of the routing, I doubt approaches won't matter. You have three like we have three kick Mike's will kick in, kick out kick so you get a chance. Every channel will get its own audio rendering. Does that make sense? When you balance through the mixer, you choose a different way you choose. Okay. I want it routed. The way I have it routed. Does everyone follow me? So check this out. If you were to select the option, keep intermediate bounce right, You're gonna get both. Follow what I just said. So let's look at the mixer right now. If I do not balance through the mixer, I am going to get a balance for every single one of these channels. The way they appear here in the mixer. Does everyone understand? Yes. Is everyone nodding online? Drew. Everyone's like, Yes, Okay, now, if I select bounced through mixer, it's going to follow. Conversely, the routing that I have set up through the mixer because it's going through the mixer, it's following the routing, right. So you, either or in that scenario, does everyone follow me so far, when you engage this button in settings that says, keep intermediate balance, you're gonna get both when you select bounced her mixer. So instead of choosing one or the other where you get the mixture the way it is and then the mixture, we have a routed when you select the keep intermediate balance and you bounced through the mixer instead of getting just one, you'll get both mixes, and the way it works is really simple as it renders the audio it's rendering the audio as it's through the mixer first and then bring it back through the mixer during the render to accommodate all your routing. Does that make sense? So the intermediate balances sort of that 1st 1? It does. So when you select that and again, you need to restart everything else. Every time you render through the mixture, you will get both, which is what a lot of people do, so you can have it the way the mixer. So you can have three individual channels for your kick, and it'll all bunch of three audio files. Or you can have the one where I have them. All you know is a stereo coming through. So again there's no right or wrong. It's how much time, energy and effort you want to put into your mix and have your audio ready. And then once your audio is there again, you can process it any way you want to. But you certainly can understand why it makes the most sense to get all of your work done. You know again, if you bounce from superior drummer toe audio before you make all your final changes every time you make another change in the program. Or every time you do something, you're gonna have to go back and rebounds. And remember what you did. Save it Rebounds from what you did. And that could be a little daunting and a little redundant. Time wise. True. We have someone armed with a question. Yeah, we D'oh. Alright, Jack has a question Jack laid on me, and, uh, he says, Hey, Drew, here's the easiest way I could think of to rephrase my question because he's asked it more than once. How do you record a drums via multi out and then bounce through the superior drummer mixer and keep both stereo and mono tracks? Not just stereo or split stereo? I e think old school. Thanks. Okay, so hey, seniors air, all stereo. Well, that was because of the way I had it routed. Correct. So let me clarify. So, Jack, you're listening. Drew's gonna be watching. Correct me. If I'm wrong, we'll get so what you want to do is you want to set Yuri drum kit up, get it all mapped out beautifully. Record your midi once you're many has done. You wanna bounce. That is audio. Like It's a normal drum track, which it is at that particular point in time. And what you're asking is when you saw my bounce, you saw that my balance had fewer channels, and they were all stereo with something in some of them panned hard laughter hard right, and when I want you to remember is my bounce had bounced through mixer enabled, and in this particular session you'll notice that my mixer has stereo channels basically enabling even mono sends. So what you saw was okay, for instance, the snare drum channel it balances is a stereo channel, but only the right side if you go back and look at the file had this because all the snare drums were panned that way. So how would you avoid that and get them just the way you see them in the mixer so you wouldn't bounce through the mixer. So when you don't bounce through the mixer, it's not gonna follow any routing that you've done, if that makes any sense. So the routing is what ultimately caused everything to be stereo because of the way that I had it routed. So if you were to just go ahead in here. Not there. Here you coming amounts and you do not balance through the mixer. If you just balance with all the bleeds on, you're going to get the mixer channels as you see them in Sapir Drummer. Just that fine. So you'll have, For instance, if there's, let's just say there's three kick channels. Your recording. You've got kick in, kick outs up. They'll be up will be a track for every channel in the mixer That makes sense is Jack. Is he interacting with C Good. Yep, Jack said yes. I want to wind up in pro tools like I just recorded acoustic drums. There it is. That's exactly what you would do. And then the follow appointed again. Great question. I know it's confusing is if you want both. If you want any routing you put into place, as well as just the standard mixer, like an old school like Jack's talking, you would come into the settings and you would check Keep intermediate bounce. Okay, once that's checked. If you ever select bounced through mixer, it's going to give you both sets of files. So your files, as they would just come like normally right and then your files, as you would have it routed through the mixer. Okay. Awesome. Jack. Yes, I hope nodding. Thank you. Who else? Anyone else I think we're getting That's pretty. Also Got a few questions we're gonna wrap up with. Yeah, well, we're done. But I mean, ultimately, let's talk about this from again. The perspective of pulling it all together. The bounce feature is very specific in the fact that a lot of people do, like toe work in the virtual instrument all the way through the end. The bouncing is not a necessity. I need to say that over and over again because a lot of people think Oh, wait a minute. I won't get my finalized sounds. No, you could keep this open, just as is in depending on your Daw. You could. Actually, if I hit play and I record enabled all of these tracks as it played, it would record the audio. You could do that like an old school thing to, but that's not really as cool as bouncing. I mean, you have more options, you have more features. There's a 1,000,000 ways that this could work, and this again is a this is indicative of a routing scenario. You could ultimately bounce through the stereo just as a stereo instrument without all this routing. Same option. Same everything else and get all your tracks. We've routed here to show people how to multi out, and then we just happen to bounce. You don't have to multi out to bounce. You could have just opened Superior Drummer as a stereo track, played your drum through it, did all of your mixing in the mixer and then chose to just bounce with all the bleeds on. Or however you want it to bleed separate, and it would still give you all of those mixer tracks you don't have to have multi channel enabled to get multiple tracks out of superior Germer. Two point. Oh, let me say that one more time. You do not have tohave multi channel routing to your Daw enabled to get the multiple mixer channels out of superior Drummer to You'll be good. So this is just the way we chose to do it, because we kind of combine the lesson of All right. Here's how you would route your multi channel out. Here's where you get everything going and then here's how you bounce to. We could have done in either way. Now, just just a reminder. Superiors, not a step sequencer. It doesn't have a piano roll editor, so it doesn't give you the ability to craft a long MIDI performance like this, so you couldn't bounce there. Be no bouncing out of solo because there's nothing to bounce your just auditioning many grooves and working with drum sounds in order to balance. You actually have to have something that can be recorded like an entire performance, and then you can bounce down. Everyone follow me so the bounce feature only works in your dog or when you have an entire performance that you can bounce down. Yes, Keil can't believe it. His head is blown. He's like what it's like. Wow!