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Routing Superior Drummer in Pro Tools

So what we want to do now is sort of just kind of button up any questions we have from the last segment. If there's anything hanging over which there may not be, which was about mapping and many nodes in many notes, and adding extra Aum's very, very popular segment and we're gonna take this into the d. A. W. Rome and we're going to look at a couple of real world scenarios that folks have already asked about, two maybe better delineate how the program is gonna work in that environment. So I'm gonna just look to drew real quick to see if we have anything pending if we have any sort of questions that we want to wrap up before we move on, um, within a doll when you save a project that saved about str you saved our you are several instances within the DOS saved separately. Does that question make sense? This We got a bunch of wrap up questions to do that. That's a lot. That's a lot of information. So here's what happens. Um, it's going to be different to some degree, and it will be similar ...

to some degree. So when you save in Superior Drummer, 2.0, were in superior. Right now we're in solo. It's in stand alone mode. So, like we've been talking about you can save is a project a combined priest, that a priest. There's different levels of saving. When you're in your Daw, everything is going to follow the dog. So again, any changes you make and superior will be captured with in superior within your dog. But that is going to be a function of the dog, and every dog functions just a little bit differently. We're gonna be going into pro tools and working there to show some things. So again, pardon me. Good lunch here was very fantastic. If you add an extra, um, saving Ekstrom, your best bat is to go into the actual program and save your combined priest that are saved your project and then save it in your dollar. Just to be sure, if all else fails, the rule of thumb is saving as many times as you can in his many different configurations as possible just to ensure you have options, whether or not you're Dar, whatever you're working in is going to be looking out for you in that capacity. So you always want toe. Save it as many ways as you can, just to be safe. At least I would. Awesome. Okay. So again, the only tab we haven't discussed yet, which we're about to discuss is the bounce tab. And the reason we haven't discussed the balance tabs because we're not in our dogs. So let me do this. Let's close solo. So again, say goodbye to solo. We're going to go ahead. Quit tune track solo. We're not going to save it. Then we're gonna come down here and we're gonna open pro tools. We're going to start. I've got a couple of things to show you, but when I want to do is start again just from scratch so that everybody can sort of understand where this is all gonna begin. So we're gonna create a blank session. We're gonna call this session, okay? And obviously we get sort of a blank window. We need to add a couple of tracks. The most important two tracks. You're going to need to make everything work. Genius stereo master bus, right. A master fader. So you can create that. You can see it's your Master Fader. This is taking all the audio out to your sound device and then out to wherever you're going. And then we need an instrument track. So in this instance, we will add a new instrument track. I mean, he needs to be stereo because Superior Drummer 2.0 is stereo. So you will come in and you'll select instrument track, and then you will create that as well. Now, I again I'm a creature of habit. So I always sort of relabel and re color my tracks just so that I can look at them and know exactly what I'm doing. And I have this weird thing about instruments being on the opposite side of the master fader. It just freaks me out. But however this works for you, as simple as this looks, this is all you need in any Daw two channels to stereo channels, your master channel and your virtual intimate channel to start working with superior drummer so you would go up to your inserts, right? And you it it's a multi channel plug in because you can have multi channel. So you'll see right here. It's pure drummer. Multi out. You would open that, and it's gonna look just like we were in solo. But now you're opening your dog. Now again, we're using pro tools 11.1. I'm a big fan of pro tools, used all the time. I love it, and I love all my brothers and sisters, an avid big shout out to them. Thanks for making great software that works with are so wonderfully when you open the program, however, just some notes for folks. And again, this is going to apply to almost any dog. You'll notice that because this is now functioning as a plug in, there's a lot of things that are added that would be unique to your dog that weren't there in solo and, most importantly, your opening this as a virtual instrument, and it's going to be subject to the tempo you set in your DOS. So right now, the temple for this project, the defaults 1 20 We can change that if we want to. I just click on it and I can make it 1 10 just because I want to do that, and then I can actually change the grade. All the things that you're doing, your dog But for now, we wanted to open in Superior because one of the questions we get a lot about working with superior in a dog is how does the balance feature work? And how does multi channel routing work? So it seems fairly simple, but I want to walk you through it anyway, If that's okay, since we're here, what I want to do now and again, we've been using the same kit for the same examples for the whole thing. If you're playing along at home, we're in the avatar Library, the stock library with the default kit. And I want to show you how you can multi out of superior drummer into this doll, which is pro tools. Everyone with me. Okay, so the first thing we've got is we've got our kit loaded. We're not going to change anything. We're not gonna add any extras were not going to do anything. This is just the stock. It the way that it comes up is the default. And if you go into the mixer, there's a couple of things you can dio um, put that back up. First of all, any time you want to zero out or bring a fader or control, you could just hit command and you can click it and it's gonna go right back to zero. That that works obviously, is a command for some functions in your doll, but also still within our software inside your dog. As you know, we have the option to hide the bus in the output channels in our mixer so that all we see are the instrument channels. Okay, these are all the channels that correspond to the instruments in the drum kit. We're looking at Everyone's with me. Everyone knows this makes total sense. So the first thing we want to do is notice that right now everything has got an output that's been selected. It's going to output one and two and what's take that? And let's actually get a little groove playing here so that we can see what we've got going on. And what we're going to do is change it up just a little bit. So we've been playing the groove in Superior Drummer. We're gonna just drag a group out to the timeline because we can. So let's just take this verse variation, drag our midi out here or not, I mean, maybe we can Maybe we can't There, this move it over, and then we've got that loop. Okay, we've got a loop point set, so everything's great. Let me make sure that in my options, I've got looped playback. Great. So we're good. Okay, So one of the things we want to do, and I'm going to just turn down here just a scootch, and I'm going to turn down my master volume as well. Because as we're routing, we have three levels of gain or volume that we're gonna be dealing with that can adversely affect sort of how the final result of the final signal works. So I'm gonna pull back here on my master volume, right? And this is different. Just so you know, you're actually in the program. This is different than pulling back the master fader in your channel. There's a little bit different. Okay, so let's work here. And right now we've got this groove. It's gonna loop. So I want to go to my mixer window because it's going to make things a little bit easier when we add tracks. So before I even look at the mixer I know as a producer or as an artist that there's at least three tracks I'm very interested in getting out of superior into their own tracks in pro tools. So a lot of times you need to look at the mixture to sort of configure how maney stereo versus mono traction need. I know that I only want one kick drum track Amano kick drum track. I only want one mano snare track and I only want one mano high hat track coming out of superior to find in my dog. So how do I do that? Well, the first thing I'm gonna do is new tracks, right? Like we talked about. We can add model tracks and pro tools. You have the option. Add multiple tracks time, so I'm gonna add three mono tracks, their audio tracks. I'm gonna create those simple enough right now I'm going to go into superior drummer And again we started with this. Don't you love it when I do that? Quit doing that. We started. Obviously everything is routed toe outputs one and two. It's a stereo output feed right now, but right here, if you click on the outputs, you can have no outputs you could individually change the way that you have everything routed. Or you can simply go to this option multi channel and the many you goto multi channel. If you look across the bottom of the mixer, all of these for lack of a better term sort of auto routes. Now here is where I want to make sure there's no confusion because there's a couple of things we need to keep in effect here. First and foremost, these all route out, as you can see in stereo pairs. Does that make sense? And now listen to me. So basically to audio signals are being routed per output. So how do you only get the mono version of the signal you're looking for? So not to confuse anyone. But, for instance, this particular kick drumming is a mono channel. We see it's got one signal. It's mano, but it's out toe one and two. That's two channels coming out. It's really simple. Everything you want routed to one channel, you pan right. So Channel One everything you want routed to the other channel, you pan to Channel two. Now, in this instance, I always shift down one channel because I'm superstitious. There's really no good reason to do it, other than it's just my habit. So, for instance, I would make all of these kick drums three and four. And what I will do is because I want all of these kick drums that are mono signals to come out on Channel three. I'll adjust the panning to be hard left. Okay, so what happens here is I've got all these audio channels, right? So me close this work with me, we're only talking about the kick drum. So let's label this kick. So we know. Okay. In my input section on the channel strip in my actual Daw, it's going to ask me where I want to get the signal from. And part of that option screen is now a plug in superior drummer and look low and behold. You have three and four left or three and four, right? Those air, two different splits. It's two different signals because we have a mono channel up. If it was a stereo channel, it would just say three and four together because the two channels would need to come out in stereo. Now, a lot of this is basic routing 101 If you're not familiar with how to use your dog or how toe work within these signal limits, you might want to go in and double check how your doll routes things when it's done. What approach was it's fairly simple. So, for instance, let's check three and four left. That's what's going to be feeding the input of this. Now there's one last component and pro tools, and we need to input enable the channel so we can actually hear what's coming in, just like we would if we were recording a kick drum. So then when we go here and we play our groove, okay, we see that we're getting channel If we solo it. The reason we still hear everything else is because we haven't hardpan anything in any other way right now. You see snare top. It's still paying center if we change the way the snares pants. Since that's also set up on Output three and four. Remember how I talked about one signal is gonna go all the way Hard left. One's gonna go hard right now. We know right here. Three and four left is just all of our kick drums, and we have all three kick drum feeds coming toe one channel. Simple enough So we would do the same thing Go to plug in. Now, this one, we want three and four. Right? And because I have hard panned all the snare sends from my mixer to the right, they'll show up in putting able. Simple enough. Does everyone follow that? Because that is something that confuses a lot of folk. Drew. Is anyone asking questions about that routing yet? So far, Not yet. Okay, good. We'll give him a few minutes. Yes. So again, follow me on this. You could see that little clipping again. Right now, I'm in the mixer and you see that I have the outputs for the actual kick channels and the snare channels. Let's go snare bottom three and four. Okay, All outputs three and four. However, I have one set of those mono signals Hard panned all the way to the left so that they're coming out Channel three. And in my Daw Channel three left, four would be the right. And you would know that because the three is on the left on the fours on the right. Does that make sense. It's fairly simple. And again, I apologize. I'm not as familiar with logic. I'm not as familiar with how it routes enable Tin or in on Studio One or even Q base. But my presumption is going to be that there are very similar controls for those dogs as well. Once it's into the doll, how it's receiving things is going to be partially the responsibility of the DOS. So, for instance, this menu that you see here where it says plug in Superior Drummer multiple outputs This is not a function of superior drummer, as it is a function of pro tools receiving what superior drummer to has to say. So if yours doesn't look exactly like this, you want to find the screen that gives you this information that showing you all of the available outputs from Superior Germer two point. Oh, so now let's do that again, because why not? Let's label this snare okay, and then let's take this last one and we'll do our high hats in our mixer right now. They're going out on seven and eight. We could have a go on five and six and because it's going to be the only hat coming in. Uhm, I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to just pan it all the way over, so it's gonna coming on five, so we'll go in. There's the plug in again, right? Five and six of five left. We should have our hats now. There they are now. Simple enough. That's the most basic component of routing you can have with superior drummer. Now we can keep doing this. So, for instance, one of the things again I like to dio is take these guys and make them a little bit easier for me to just identified by color. I generally tend to do much better in my software or any project I'm working on when I have visual cues and it should be mentioned as soon as I have the rest of the channel set up, we're going to start talking about a couple of the gain stage options you have just so that we're clear about what's happening and what's not happening now. This is where it gets interesting as well. So again we've got superior drummer. The instrument is on an instrument track, and then we have audio tracks with the different inputs allocated right now that match up with our outputs here. Anyone? Has anyone lost us? We do have a question, though. Is there a reason you're using audio channels and then putting them in input enable mode as opposed to just using mono ox channels? Either way, it's so here's here would be the only difference. Yes, the import talks channel doesn't necessarily doesn't doesn't need in pro tools. You don't have to input enable anything. You could just use the auction so you could do it that way. If you do it this way, I'll show you later. I could actually hit record and record to these channels as well get the audio going. So if I wanted to lay this down and record it like a session old school style, you could so there there's no right or wrong. You could do it either way. Okay, now, I don't know that that's true again with all the other dollars. But to this, Who's this? Who's the person? That s question Zach. Zach to your point, um, it's really preference. You're gonna get the same result only with the oxen puts. You don't have to worry about capturing the input. Select button. It'll just go straight through. Cool. Cool. Okay. More questions. What if you have master settings in Superior Drummer set to mono on Lee. How that is going to be a function again. Then you'd have everything mono channels. And then when we balance, you're gonna get mono channels to. So that would ultimately just change the break out in the mixer. The routing would be the same. You'd still need to go in and around everything the way you wanted. And you can actually, as I'm going to show you sort of combined channels into one channel and superior. I'm into your dollars. Well, so I mean, it will affect things, but not to the point where it's not manageable. It would just mean you'd have individual ever. There would be no stereo channels. Everything would be your own kind of live. So the next channel, what I'm going to do here is I'm gonna add a couple more tracks. I'm gonna add a couple of stereo audio tracks. I'm gonna add three of those just because okay. And then I've got those guys. Let me move them over here and now one of the things that I dio. Not everybody does it, but I put all the toms on the same channel so I can go again into Superior. And I can say, OK, how many times do I have? Even if I'm not using them? Eso rack Tom one is on 9 10 9 10 And what's kind of nice is it's got them already set up on a stereo channel for nine and 10 so I can simply go in, check my plug in see how again. It's not asking me. Three. Laughter. Four. Left. It's just saying nine. Intended to stereo send. It's a stereo set 9 10 Boom So that Tom's Air now stereo hardpan in this channel right here, Toms. And ultimately, I have the individual panting, still intact in this mixer. As you can see, if you look at sort of the way these are gone, racked someone pan all the way over here. This is you've got a kind of this hardpan that's little bit a different sense, so you could set this up anyway. You want to, and it's going to be affected in the stereo image of the actual output track. Right now, there's a couple of other things, too. So your overheads, right? So we can always take these 2 11 and 12. It's kind of nice to stereo tracks Lineup. Quite nice. Move this over a little bit. Let's take this into 11 and 12. That's input. Enable all this stuff and then let's do it's kind of a combo track. So what's left after the overheads with 11 and 12 are some Ambien channels. You have ami in close ambient, mid ambient foreign ambient mono. Now, you could take each one of these out individual if you wanted to. I always combine all of the ambient channels in the superior mixer into one ambient channel for me in my project, because that's easier for me again. No. Right or wrong. So all you would do is you've got 13 and 14 that we just go and make sure that we're on 13 and 14 so that all these guys are going to come out 13 and 14 including the mono if you want to. So then close this guy in putting able here, plug in 13. 14. Okay, and now when we play, we have our sessions now routed from superior drummer into our mixture. We have obviously all the complete mixture controls. We have everything happening that you'd have in a normal session. Very cool stuff. Now, here's some of the really cool features. Um, we're just getting started, so we have a couple of levels of control of the sound. Obviously, we have the master volume. Fine. Obviously, every channel individual instrument recording channel has its own fader that you can work with to raise and lower appropriate to the mix. Right now, we also know on the construct page we have a completely independent level control that will basically just take the performance prior to the mixer and level things out if we need to. If there's too much high hat, we could just bring the hats down in the MIDI performance and then still adjust the overall mix in the mixture that these two things are independent. So by the time we get here, we've already got two levels of great control. But then, if we enable our buses so we consume in our outputs, not only do you have busing going on in play, and again, if there's anything sent to a bus, you'd see it down here and the buses, you'd see that these would be enabled on audio would be coming out. We don't have anything bust right now, but we have output. Fader Isas Well, so they say out. So as you're playing, you also have another level of attenuation through volume here at the output stage. So before you even get to your Daw mixer, you have the individual component volume. You have the channel volume of the bus volume of the output volume. So you have a lot of control and there's there is a big benefit again to working within the mixer in Sapir Drummer to to sort of minimize any more work you might need to do in the Dawes Mixer. So again were in the mixer page. We can hide these any time we want to. If we flip this stereo field, that's gonna flip the stereo field. There's a couple of things we should talk about, though, when making changes and one of the reasons you wait till sort of the end or you work in solo and you build your kid and you get everything squared. When you bring all your mixer channels in is because once you've routed its appear to point. Oh, right now we have this drum set routed. This way everyone follows me, right? We know how we got here. If I go in and select a different kits, another preset or anything else that's going to change, the mixer set up and all of this routing is gonna be for not. And you're gonna have to go and reroute all over again to accommodate anything you've added or changed. Does everybody follow me? So this mixer set up is literally great for this configuration of drums as I have them set up. But if I add any extra ums, the mapping won't matter because the mapping will you fix the mini. But anything that's gonna change the mixer or the amount of things in the mixer is going to change the routing. So understand that, especially if you start toddling, you know, warrants appeared drummer and we love this and it sounds great. But now we want to just pull up a whole new library, a whole new kid altogether. All of your routing is going to go. Bye bye. And you're gonna have to start all over again. It will not hold, So I always like to encourage people again. We started solo because a lot of times you can get your head wrapped around great drum sounds and all the things you wanted by the time you moved your Daw. You've already streamlined everything to the point where you're setting up your chances. You're going, you're mixing. And now you have all these other options. Cool. Has everyone feel good? Okay, so some things you can do, um and you shouldn't be afraid of doing so. Let's pull the buses back up as we talked about earlier. You've got all this internal routing with these buses, and the bus is can be output ID. Output it again. Not a word. The buses can be sent via output to their own channel as well. So this gets you kind of wrap your head around the bus going to a bus, going to a bus. So, for instance, if we wanted to take our snare drum, we have snare drum going through, you know, it's a snare drum. Compare. So let's say we want to go to bus wanted to. Now we know in the internal mixer from yesterday with two options. We can send everything together in the same corresponding sort of capacity both the direct signal and the bleed signal. Or we could decouple this and change the volume of the bleed. We could remove the bleed altogether or remove the direct signal altogether. So what I'd like to do just for demonstrations say, because let's just tend the bleed. So the bleed is going to go to bus one and two in our superior mixer is everyone. Follow me now below the superior mixer below this peer below this bus send. We have the option to send it pre effects, post effects or post fader again. Anyone that's familiar with audio should be familiar with these terms, but pre effects is pretty self explanatory. What everyone agree? Yeah, it's before it hits. Any effects that might be happening appear post effects. It's the opposite of that. It's going to be sent with all of the effects that you've applied, if any up there and then post fader would mean post everything. So all that stuff, your volume level, your attenuation, everything is there and it's going with the whole kit and caboodle, as they say. So the next step since we have this is to see what kind of bleeds. If we're just going to send the bleed, we don't have any bleed. Let's add the kick and let's add the Hi hats, okay? And then weaken solo this nice. Just sending Bly's and that's kind of cool. And one of the things we can do again got a hard panels bringing center, which is great, and then we can affect those bleeds. So in this bus right here, we could use a preset. We could say, Hey, let's use a snare preset, uh, guillotine transients. It's gonna make those transient snap a little harder in the bleed, which is interesting, because the bleed is just what's being captured around it. And then we can route this out right now. It's not routed out, so let's route this out really far to 19 and 20. Okay, Makes sense. So then we can go in our mixture. Let's stop this and on mute things that everything sounds good. All right, so we're rounding out to 19 and 20. Very simple. We would add another stereo track. Okay. Mono stereo audio track create. We find it. This will be the bleeds called a snare bleed. We might want to spell it right. It's gonna be bleed bus. Okay, great. This is 19 and 20 from the plug in, Right? Okay. And then we would input enable. Let's so that and we've got control over that. We can bring that in. We can start to affect things now. It's interesting anyone whose ears might be a little more sharply to notice that the minute I brought that in, you could hear the bleed causing some variance in the phasing, which is something that people talk about all the time, especially with the high hat, so you can obviously pull that back. There's a number of things you can do once you're here and again all of this stuff. All of these options are pretty much limitless. And based on whatever you want to try or do so again, it's very important. Ah, couple of things, when you're working in your Daw, normally, Dawes have a window that you can look at that will show you your system usage and a lot of times when you have a lot going on, especially when you're working with sample based instruments. It's not a bad idea to look at how you're taxing the CPU Pro Tools has this really cool window where I could see the kind of activity is going on. So, using 25% of the memory allocated, I seem pretty safe. You could still get some clicks, pops, buzzes or whatnot, depending on how fast or slow or newer older system is. So again, keep an eye on everything. Like when we introduced those bleeds. We're introducing some more RAM that we need to process more samples were introducing some options here with our layer limits. All of the things we've put into play really become important as we move into this final stage. Okay, so this was a show you how to do it from the ground up. Have one that I want to show you next. That's completed, that we are going to actually go over the bounce features with So before I close this protocol session and I open another one and pray that everything works perfectly. Do we have any questions about the basics of routing inside the mixture to the external mixture or or is there anyone that you know I didn't get that step do it again. Does everyone understand where we're at? Where we can turn what we see on and off where the mikes are? Where the output SARS? Is everybody good so far? Yeah. You guys air top notch. All right, so I'm not allow saving writes. I'm gonna close this session. Now, let me open a recent session, which I believe is this one here. It's gonna open up your drummer multi out spirit from a 2.4 point three telling me all my stuff. Yeah, this is the one. So this is a session. We'll play a real quick to just make sure it's okay. So this session is a little bit different. Let me show you where I'm at what I've done so we can get to what I'm gonna do. I have a custom kit. I have it cashed in 16 bit mode because I just felt it sounded fine. I've added some extra drums. I have this particular you know how I like to add a sneer. I have some other symbols engaged in disengaged. I have my layer limits. Sit. My layer limits set, which is like layer limits, sit, but only different. And correct. Sorry, I have a number of articulations envelopes. Pretty much I have a kit dialed in. Okay, and what I've done is I've multi out it. I've got all my stuff said, I've got my volume said, I've got a kick bus going and all of the things that I have in play are focused here. I've got some volume set and I have a groove. Actually, um, I already have a performance, so it's less than a minute, but it's a complete mini groove that I put together, and I've chosen the articulations in this group to sort of again. We're putting it all together to highlight an ideal scenario. So in my mind, here's this fantasy scenario. I'm a guy that's doing music for a video or commercial or something that you've got to get in or out. So I have a groove that I'm going to write a song to. The song's Under a Minute long, which is very common for cues and things of that nature, and it takes you through a bunch of different tones. I'm using nothing but stock drums in the Avatar kit. Nothing. The only external effects I actually have our tune track effects that might as well show you those. I have a version of easy mix on my superior kick drum bus. I have a couple of kick drums around it to a bus here, so I have a drum bus dynamics preset and easy mix. We'll talk about easy mix in just a second and then across the Master Channel. From our mastering pack, I have, ah, metal super wide preset. That's going to affect the way the drums sound coming to the match. Everything else. That's it. Everything else you're hearing is stock created straight out of superior. So let's listen to the groove. Let's all be impressed by the human dynamic that is the mini performance. Are we ready? Here we go. We're moving to some more dynamics here. Different there. Articulations the cow bell. It's there in all its glory and that's it. We're out. That's a very, very simple, very effective groove. And quite honestly, had you not watched me show it to you, I could have told you, Was anyone playing at any particular reason we captured it through the best, and I wouldn't be lying to you because these Midi grooves are all standard tune track grooves that have come from various different libraries that I simply just drag to the timeline and lined up the D made sense. I changed the cowbell pattern a little bit because it wasn't originally a cow bell. It was a ride Cymbal. I moved that down in the piano roll editor, and then I ultimately went into Superior Drummer and affected the performances through all of the sound shaping tools that are available per instrument. So tune things differently. Bring things in layer them, apply envelopes, change the articulations, make sure that multiple hits emulation is owning my symbols. I did all the things that we've talked about. I then maximize the best use of my Ram because I know that this isn't gonna be the only thing open in my project. I'll have to add a base or piano or maybe a guitar. Who knows? There could be any other host of virtual instruments that I need to add, and they may be on a deadline, so I don't have time to mess around with this, and ultimately, again, even the kit down to adding the extra Tom in swapping some symbols out. Everything that we've talked about sort of comes together here