Lessons

Lesson Info

Using MIDI

so recap we did the construct page. We've gone over the settings we just did. The basic mixer layout we all feel good about how we're getting things to in and out from so grooves is the last page we're going to do today and some super complicated. But it bears sort of going through because it is more recent addition again. Remember, if you are an original owner of Superior 2.0, the group's page was not there when the software first came out. It was added a few years later, and the Grooves page basically mimics the original grooves page from the first easy drummer. Very, very simple and execution in the way that it works. But I'll say this caveat. Many of you that may be thinking about getting into Superior Drummer 2.0, you'll end up buying a boxed version of it more than likely from a retailer. They'll have a box. And because it's retail, we don't always know how long those boxes have been sitting around. So in the event that you buy a version of superior 2.0, and it's not the new or 2...

.4 version in the box because there are some boxes that are newer. Obviously, they have that Don't panic when you install your like. But he said, there'd be a grooves pigeon, the updates in your in your account. Just go to to track dot com and download. It will bring it completely up to date with the random hit simulation and the Grooves page, because a lot of these things have been added over the years that superiors been out to accommodate new products and user requests. So we're in the grooves page. And simply put, this is a column structure view of your MIDI. Now, all of the many or the majority of the many that I have is to track Midi because I think that we make and record obviously the most and the best mini for our products. We're releasing new many content all the time. So not only when you buy um, like an STX Ernie ZX, will you get Midi that's included with it. It's different Midi and then normally will also release Midi. That's in the theme of whatever that STX was. So, for instance, we recently released an easy X called Post Rock that was recorded in Iceland and is beautiful, so that product came with many to go with it Beautiful. But in addition to that, the same day we released what we call post rock grooves, which is not the same midi that came with it. But, you know, again more money that you can use in the vein of that genre. So our big thing as artists and again all of our founders, all of the people that work at to track musicians, artists, people that use this stuff. And I have no problem telling you. We make things selfishly like very selfishly like we want that we should make it because we don't expect anyone else to make it. That's literally the governing principle behind whether or not we're going to do something like what I use that absolutely. Then we do it, and that's a beautiful thing because it keeps it very true to making music. So all of that said, we find that the more options you have, the more creativity you can sort of combine and work with. So in this instance, again, as you look through my mini browse or what you'll see is very simple superior libraries there's gonna be a library that corresponds to every expansion component I have. So the Metal Founder, all of the STX, is have their own mini, and you'll find that here add on packs. This is many that does not come with our expansion media, but instead is just that. Just many groups you can buy these in all types of different styles and formats. We have things like Monster, Many Library of Extreme, which is like thrash and death metal songwriter stuff, just very basic, from very basic, very complex that will go all the way down to the easy player pro Mitty. Now this comes with Superior Drummer because again, as I told you the beginning, Easy Player Pro used to be a program that was packaged with superior drummer because you needed it in order to have any many functionality. And it had its own mini. So obviously I have that easy drummer libraries. These are the libraries that would come with easy drummer to. Since I have that on my system as well, it's gonna have its own heading easy X libraries, thes air, all the expansion, many packs that come with the expansion libraries as you can see, I think, at the time of this recording, with 25 different easy acts libraries. So it's like going to 25 different studios and having access to everything that goes on there and then platinum samples, which is 1/3 party manufacturer that makes many I have some of their MIDI. And then, as I showed you earlier, I have a my MIDI Files folder, which is just got to folders that I've dropped in so that, you know, this is stuff that's been brought off the Internet. So this isn't necessarily formatted to work with our stuff, but it's free many, so why not mess with it? So if we come back to our favorite groove that we've played all day, every day, Okay, we hit play. Obviously we've got things going on the mixer, right? It's pretty awesome. Let's do this. I like that. Let's go in and let's ah, go back to Avatar were in Avatar. Let's go to the default kit. All right, so we've got going on on the mixer, make sure your mixtures clear. You've got nothing else going on, right? And what's interesting again with this midi? So you go to grooves is it's broken down by Okay, here's the pack that it comes in. Here is some information. It's broken out in song structure, in most instances in the song structure relevant to the style that it's in. So since this is a songwriter's filled pack, this would be a mid tempo song. Straight grew for four. Most people are going to identify with that and then within that. So okay, here's a heavy rock version of that. Here's a country rock version. Here's a commercial rock version. Okay, so it's gonna have an intro, verse pre course, and then even within that, it's got different variations of what might happen. So you've got options. So again, every single one of these is going to be different. It's going to be subtle, For instance, you know, averse groove. Let me, um, you know, close out of here because I'm too lazy to find what I did or didn't do. And since I have a new Mac, it's lightning fast. Watch this boom. It's like we never closed it all. Oh, so sexy. And so what? You fix everything. So you go to the grooves, come back to where we were at. Um that's monster. Many we wanted songwriters. Phil Pack, We're gonna go here. We're going to go here and then we've got variation four, which is what I've been playing. But if you go to variation three a little bit different, very shocked to see have different dynamic levels. Why is that important? Because, as we said earlier, as you construct your song and you put all of your many together different articulations are going to be used for the different parts. So as you're doing that again, we can load unlimited so that you have all of the options available, right until you know what options you need and you can actually even get down to kit pieces. Like if you wanted the MIDI for just the kick in this, you could just grab the kick drum if you thought that was very cool. Now, obviously anyone watching this that has easy drummer to knows and understands that the MIDI capabilities needs a drummer tour like otherworldly compared to the basic components of what we're showing you here. So that's kind of one another. One of those reasons why it is very valuable to own both because they do work together and you can accomplish different things. But let's just double check one more thing here for us. Let's go back here. Go to this pre course and this variation. One simple group. Right now, this groove is locked to the tempo that we have set in tune track solo right now, which is 100 20 beats per minute. But that doesn't mean that that's the temple that the groove was recorded at. And a lot of times, even though it's many information and it could be sped up or slowed down with no challenges whatsoever, you lose some of the feel when you do one or the other. So we have this function here. This is the original tempo. So when you click this little Metrodome down here, it's going to show you that it was originally quoted at 75 beats per minute and gonna play it there. This'll changes the entire feel of the song, and you may say to yourself, Huh, I dig that feel more than the feel I've got going. Let me change my master tempo and then this will kind of play along. Does it seem like it's something you know is all the time. Believe it or not, Now that you know it's there, you will use it all the time. You be like, I wonder what the original temple of this performance waas. And then when you turn it off, obviously it will go back to whatever you've got. Now you also see these other buttons halftime, normal time, double time, really simple. And this is a holdover from easy drummer. So if you right now, have it it it's normal time. 120 beats per minute playing normal time. All right, if I cut it in half now it's like dirty. And here's where your normal drummer is. That's what you normally sounds like double time. So even within that one particular groove, you have options within the MIDI. Here and again, you also have a master velocity option. So this is very important because as we adjust the velocity, we're not just making things louder and softer. We now know that when you get to certain velocity layers, they're soft hits and medium. It's so as we pull the velocity down, it's literally gonna be like telling your friends. Mom just got home plate quieter. Check this out so it takes AIM Group. And once we're there, we can go back into construct and grab this high hat and all right, a little quieter. We bring up the multiple hits emulation on the high hat so that it's a little smoother. Then we can cut it in half. Well, we give me, like, OK, Mom's gone. Bring it back. Now everything's 1 27 but notice the difference. The multiple hits, emulation and just bringing the high hat down in the performance. Simple enough. We can always command Quick back Normal, pretty self explanatory, but incredibly useful, right? So how does many work and superior? It's very simple. We're gonna go over it again tomorrow, but its dragon drop so that this is the groove. You want all of the things that you're going to do to it here, make it half time, adjust the velocity. You can simply grab it, drag it to your desktop, or you could just drag it straight into your track on the dog and you're done. All of the universal changes you've made here will be affected in that many. Then cool makes sense. That's a pretty cool feature, right? So ultimately, one of the other things to keep in mind is as you're adjusting and again, I keep going back to how everything works together. As you're adjusting grooves as you're finding different many strategies and solutions, all of the things in the mixer are slightly changing. All of the articulations are slightly changing all of your memory needs or slightly changing, so all of these things are symbiotic. We didn't just go over all of this information, so it's like, Oh, we got time to fill It really does make a difference how you set the session up. Now the good news is, is where you start with the session with the taxing of your CPU in the memory and even the articulations in the way that this has played out. That's not where you need to end the best part of superior German. That we're going to see tomorrow was, once you've got everything finalized, you can then still again maximize the software to perform with other software. Now again, think about this for a second. Right now, pretty basic stuff. We don't have an entire many track laid out. We just have a groove were pretty basic. Kit were eating up 779 megabytes Right now, not bad. We're under a gig we're still using. All the articulations were wide open. We have all our options. We also haven't enabled any bleed on any channels in the mixture yet. We haven't put any effects on anything. We haven't altered anything here. We haven't loaded any extra ums. We haven't done a number of things, so this could be a little misleading. Now think about all those things. Adding up and then opening Superior drummer in a session. We have maybe a number of other virtual instruments that are also CPU intensive because they have a lot of options. It could be a recipe for disaster. That's why really knowing how all of these things work together is so important because it really can make the experience of making music with this software very enjoyable. Questions concerns France Belgium People are really enjoying it now. Spain and Brazil, Brazil love from Spain and Brazil. Nice. Yep. I like it's greetings from Caleb in central Spain, and here it's after midnight. But it's well worth staying up late to take part in this excellent class by Rick and the creative Live team. Thanks so much, guys. And thanks to the to tune track for providing us recording drummers with SD to the best drumming software available Cheers. It's like he knew what I wanted to say when we were gonna end the classes. Like, I'm just gonna say it Anyway, I'm gonna save for you. Okay? So follow me here because we've covered a lot and I don't want to go back over everything ever again like this in the history of ever. That's why we're filming all this. But I want to make sure that we leave no stone unturned before we get to. This is happening tomorrow. This is every bit is insanely crazy and awesome as it looks. It's gonna take the whole morning to get through X drums and mapping. That's an important part. And then putting all of this together in a real session is another hole. It's a part of the day that I think we need to get Teoh. So what we need to do is construct. We totally get right. I see a bunch of heads nodding. We get how important this is. We get our settings. We understand that within the settings were basically again applying a universal sort of list of rules that are going to help the program adapt to the way we work. We totally get that. This entire demonstration has been done in tune track solo, which is a shell that hosts superior Drummer. And it really is ideal for people using this as a live component because again, for instance, just as you have this mixer, right, So we talked about the mixer, all the channels, all the bleed. Then you have your output channels. So again, on your output channel, maybe we didn't cover this, so I just turned his back on both your output and bus channel. You also have failures. So as you're continuing to mix things, think about all the levels of gain and control you have again before you even leave our program. So you've got the actual instrument level individual with relation one another. You have the mixer channel level, you have the bus level, then you have the output level. So if you have a snare drum that goes from the channel to a bus to the output and then here in solo, right? You have the master volume and then this master volume for So this is just the master volume here for superior. You have so many stages of gain and control over your level that even that's fairly impressive. If you're just an e drummer again and this is someone who's already invested, you know, another think of e drummers. There's really no cheap electronic drum kits. You're you're spending money. So to utilize the software to its fullest potential is what we want everyone to be able to dio and again how maney Elektronik drum sets give you this kind of control over the actual sound you're gonna be using the fact that you're any drummer and if you're used to recording in a section because a lot of guys become e drummers by necessity, they don't want to be e drummers, but they live in an apartment or a townhouse, and maybe their gig is playing out live or doing sessions or there in that band. That's all around town. And they want to practice at home and still feel like it's the real deal. By turning on the bleed and maximizing their ram and CPU requirements were giving people an opportunity to basically play in this instance. Avatar Studios. So while we're in the mixer because I think everybody digs the mixture Channel, just maybe a preview because I know a lot of people own expansion media, right? But everybody has known everything so why we're here. And we're sort of just stating, formulating questions, thinking about things, pondering, stroking imaginary beards or, in my case, the real thing. While we're doing that, let's look at some of the crazy mixer options that we have in some of these particular STX is That's no good. Everybody likes to geek out. So one of the more popular and more recent STX libraries is the independent STX. Does anyone want to guess where that was recorded here in Seattle somewhere, Anyone? Because I don't know the name Bill. Do you know the name of the studio? I used to have it on the tip of my tongue. Yeah, I've asked as in like a vast Zemaitis. And as you can see in this particular kit, what we've got is kicked your man out. We've got the sub. We have kicked from far. There's a channel you don't see a lot, right? You've got all kinds of different options here. You've got the mono kit, ambient mono ami. Far a number of different things going on. So again very different than Avatar. And then if you go, if we go back to, like, roots where I talked about before, Warren Blackbird Studios Holy cow. First of all, if we go unlimited in roots just because of sort of the the way that we recorded in the way that we did things check this out so unlimited on just a basic kit, you jump up to 1200. We haven't done anything yet. When you get to the mixer, I'm going to kill the outputs. And the bus is not only do you have snare drum top dynamic snare drum top condenser snare drum bottom hats, all the rack toms the floor times if overhead rear overhead sacks don't even know what that is. We have two checks, makes me want to think that like there was a saxophone player there and we recorded for whatever reason, drums through microphone Over said. I know that's not what we did, but in my mind, that's a visual like Kenny G doing a thing where, like, don't play, We just We need the mic there. Just stand there. That's how we would do it. And the Miami and Fire. This is the one that got the deck a tree in it. It's got the chamber in and again. All of these options are available to you when you purchase this different media. And tomorrow, what we're gonna do is show you how to take those options. Who? Mm, totally different than Avatar, isn't it? We're gonna show you how to take those options and incorporate them even further into your creations and what you have going. So again, let's talk about what we need to do tomorrow. So first of all, if you have Superior Drummer, try this stuff out tonight, make sure you put everything to the test because we get here in the morning. The first thing I'm gonna ask Drew to do is see if there's any pending questions from the day before anything we covered today that you thought about your like I'll wait a minute. He didn't talk about this or we didn't say that are Here's a menu option. We lightly breezed over. Get it going because this is this is everybody's chance to get all the information. So play with all this stuff tonight and then tomorrow we're gonna start fresh. We're gonna start with X drums and mapping, which is gonna be everyone's favorite, because again, we're gonna doom or of the impossible. And bring drums that were recorded into A and two B and B into and mix and match Mike channels and explain how things work and give everyone an idea of how the media works. We're gonna work more with the controller, and then we're going to be spending the afternoon tomorrow in a pro tool session, pulling it all together. We're gonna have the audience making decisions, helping us make decisions that folks online saying, Hey, try this, try that so that we could get a real world example of all the things that can go right or go wrong Now that we have all this stuff together, Yes, opening up. My question is a little late regarding the mixer page, a tender out everything out of my dog for outboard processing and four summing. As far as I can tell, SD two won't route out mano signals. This is correct. For instance, if I'm trying to rout out of Snow Amano stare directly out of logic and into a compressor. It seems to only access my d A in stereo pairs. Am I missing something? Yes. And that's more of a function of your Daw in Superior. So there's a couple of things and don't ever apologize. You're not late. First of all, you can affect this in your settings mono all channels so you can ensure that every channel in the mixer are make sure to start with his mono. The next step is when you come into the mixer, you see how we have output one and two. I put one into output three and for what you want is multi channel and it's gonna automatically assign things. Okay, so this is not what you're married to. This is where it starts. This is what it would think. OK, hey, this is where I'd want to be. So you can change, For instance, the panning of where this comes out with your routing based on the panning here. Very simple. So what you want to do is route, for instance. Let's say you want to take this kick drum out, and I would solo it in your daughter. Make sure that your routing just that out to a mono track in your Daw once it's arrived in your daughter mono track the routing from your daw through your sound card or through even your master. That's on the dog. That's not on us. Superior is only going to get the sound from superior to your Daw. Where it goes from the dog is going to be a function actually off the multi output rounding capabilities or how you have things set up in your daughter and we will go over some of that tomorrow. We're going to show everyone how that works. I'm sorry, I'm not sorry mean I use pro tools. I've been approached his user for years, and I'm sure your logic user, because you've been a logic user for years. But somewhere in the middle, most of the terminology will generally line up and you'll be able to figure out what commander function you would need in your Daw. But it is possible, so we'll get to the bottom of it. One way or another. We'll do everything we can. Um, so will custom midi map ings that I create well, working in the dog carry over to solo and vice versa. Many map ings. Can you be more specific whether it's a hardware, many mapping or so yes, would be the idea. So there's a couple of things that will show you tomorrow for your many mapping for you can save presets persons for our But yes, you could do some super cool stuff that we're gonna have a blast showing you that's very musical. So the short answer is yes. The long answer is yes. But tune in tomorrow because we don't know exactly how to do it. You're gonna love it cool.