Superior Drummer : making life uneasy!

[Bigat78]

Hi everybody

in these days i'm trying to create an appropriate workflow for my projects. My main DAW is obviously DP8, but i also use Logic X for writing.

Well, straight to the point: how can i get a tru and real life multioutput from Superior Drummer (v. 2.4)? In short words i want to have in order to track and then to mix:

- 1 MONO kick (or two if i play metal)
- 1 MONO snare (or two , bottom and top)
- 1 MONO hi-hat
- 1 MONO for each tom
- 1 STEREO Overhead
- 1 STEREO Ambient mic

Superior Drummer in DP only gives stereo multichannel option; in the settings you can flag the "mono all channels" option, but the first channel is always associated to the VI and is a stereo channel.

I tried panning hard left and hard right every piece of the kit associated with a stereo bus, to have for example : Snare Top and Snare Bottom - Output 1-2 , so ST to channel 1 left and SB to channel 2 right, considering the stereo bus like the sum of a mono left to a mono right.
This workflaw is correct in theory but in real life you get a lot of problems when routing .

So which are your workflaws or your method to get a real life drum tracking from Superior Drummer here in DP?

Thanks in advance for your collaboration

[Guitar Gaz]

There may be things you can do on the routing in Superior Drummer and using X drums which you could maybe channel separately. I can only presume you are using compression separately on each drum - and I have no idea why you want to work this way so couldn't comment - whether the Toontrack Support forum can help maybe a route to go.

If it was me, I would work with the MIDI files till the arrangement was all set in stone, and then if I wanted to do this I would just record each drum separately as an audio file (maybe filter out the MIDI file for each drum) and then work with the separate audio files - you can always bounce down when you are happy.

[Bigat78]

HI Guitar Gaz, thanks for your reply.
Well, what i've written in the first post belongs to the tracking (or bouncing) stage of the production. Obviously first i work with the MIDI until i am satisfied.

I think multioutput is a great feature for mixing but, maybe i'm wrong, i cannot understand why only stereo channels are available, when in real recording studios you mic the drums with a configuration similar to the one i posted in my thread.

So, it's not a matter of life and death, or a business issue, but i want to understand if my ideas are right and if i can get a satisfying mix for my projects.

And yes, when all track are on my sequence window , then i could make subgroups or not to use some compressor the way i want.

To the actual stage , this is impossible due to the only stereo option available or at least i didn't understand how to get what i want from this piece of software.

[Bigat78]

until now i've done in this way:

1) create the necessary aux stereo tracks as many as the SD mixer says, then send a mono (or stereo in caso of overheads, ambient etc) bus to a audio track , then push rec to render the audio track. This works but i think there are some issues with the real volumes of the tracks ...

2) create the necessary aux mono and stereo tracks as many as the SD mixer says,

let's suppose i have snare top and bottom on output 3-4 , i create 2 aux stereo track , then pan ST hard left and SB hard right from Superior mixer; then send bus 3 to an aux and bus 4 to the other : in theory i will get two mono audio track , one for each Snare ....

But i think these are very confusing workflaws

[Phil O]

You can fold down to mono with some creative routing. It's not elegant, but it's a doable work-around.
1 Create a stereo bus (1-2) and a mono bus (3)
2 Create two aux tracks.
3 Assign your stereo track's output to bus 1-2.
4 Assign first aux track's input to bus 1 and output to bus 3.
5 Assign second aux track's input to bus 2 and output to bus 3.
6 Bus 3 now carries your mono signal.