So you want to export the individual instruments played in Superior Drummer as audio files? Easy! Here’s a step by step way to do it. For this tutorial, I’ll be using Cubase 5.

First, create a new empty project in Cubase, and after it opens, click on Devices/VST instruments, and select Superior Drummer:

Note that I’m not using the usual function of adding a VST instrument track; this is important. If you add a normal VST instrument track, you won’t be able to use SD’s multiple outs. Make sure to use this method.

When you add the instrument, Cubase will ask you if you want to create a MIDI track assigned to Superior Drummer – go ahead and click Create.

Now, in Superior drummer, click on the MIXER button, and in the mixer window, in the OUTPUT row, click the orange text which reads “Out ½” – the menu that appears will have many options; we want to select “Multichannel“.

Now, go back to your VST instruments panel in Cubase, and in the row for Superior Drummer, you’ll see a button next to the E button which is used to open the mixer window for the VST instrument. This is the outputs button. Click on it, and click “Activate All Outputs“:

Now that you’ve done that, look at your Cubase project window; you’ll notice that you’ve got multiple channels – one for each of the outputs in Superior Drummer:

Now, go back into Superior Drummer, and open your MIDI Grooves, and browse to the one of your choice:

Now, drag this MIDI groove onto the MIDI track that Cubase created for you at the beginning of this project, and the MIDI will appear in your project window pane. Click on the MIDI clip to select it, and then right click it; in the menu that pops up, select Transport/Locators To Selection:

Now, hit play on the Cubase transport. You’ll see that each of the tracks (as long as there’s an instrument playing on it) will be showing output:

It’s a good idea at this time to name those tracks to match those in Superior Drummer:

Now, let’s say we want to export the Kick to an audio wave file, so we can use it in other productions, or effect it with audio effects. Simple! Solo the Channel assigned to the kick drum:

If you’re playing back audio, you should only hear that kick drum now.

Now, click on File/Export/Audio Mixdown:

In the window that appears, name your track, select where to save it, and under the “Import into Project” heading, select “Audio Track“. This will create a new audio track with that Kick drum wave file on it; you can also import it into your Pool, if you wish.

When you’re done, hit “Export“, and exit the audio exporter when you’re done. When you go back into the project pane, you’ll see that you’ve got a brand new Wave file on a new audio track; this is your Kick drum!

You can repeat this process for all of the drums you wish to export and use as audio files, and then do with them what you wish!

I hope you found this useful. Happy drumming!

-Brian

Getting EZplayer pro set up in Ableton Live can be confusing at first, so I thought I’d write up a tutorial with some images.

For this tutorial I’ll be using Ableton 7.0.16.

First, open up Ableton, and open your plugins dialog. Scroll down to EZplayer and drag it into the device creation section, or create a new MIDI track to put it on.

Next, do the same for your Toontrack Plugin of choice, in this case, EZdrummer:

Now, we’ll set up the MIDI routing to tell EZdrummer to take its MIDI input from EZplayer Pro. Click on the pulldown under “MIDI from” select “EZplayer”.

Now do the same for the pulldown under “MIDI FROM“, selecting “EZplayer” from the pulldown. Finally, record enable this track.

Now jump back to the channel that you’ve got EZplayer Pro on. Open the EZplayer interface, and select the drummer you want to use from the pulldown next to the Velocity knob. I’ll select “EZdrummer” from the Toontrack menu:

Now I need to tell EZplayer what channel its going to send MIDI information to. Click the same pulldown you just used to select your drummer, and navigate to the MIDI output menu – select the channel you have EZdrummer on, in this case, channel 3:

Next, select a MIDI groove from your library of grooves and loops. You can drag some of them into EZplayer’s interface from here, or you can audition them using the quick audition player.

Finally, hit play in EZplayer; you’ll notice that EZdrummer is playing back the selected MIDI groove:

That’s it! I’ve included an Ableton Live set for quick reference or you can build this set yourself and save it as a template.

Happy drumming!

-Brian

My - insert Sampler Based plug-in here (Superior Drummer, Groove Agent, etc) - is causing my DAW to

• crash
  
• take 20 minutes to load
  
• Freeze the system
  
• makes the system sluggish or all of the above when opening the session….
  

Or as I’ll put it: “What exactly is happening with RAM in these larger sessions?”

First, before getting hot under that collar, try a little experiment.  Start a NEW session in your DAW, one that doesn’t have any tracks and isn’t coming from any templates.  Now create an instrument track and instance the ‘problem’ plug-in.  Chances are it loads just fine and now works.  So what is going on?  In a nutshell, you’re session is requiring either more RAM than your system has to offer, or is requiring more RAM than the application can allocate…. huh?

It’s like this…

Currently the most RAM an application ON A MAC can allocate is about 4.5 GB of RAM.   If your system has 4 GB or less of RAM to begin with, then you’ll be hitting that ceiling sooner which is obvious.  What isn’t obvious is that for folks who have 6 or more GB of RAM installed your DAW still can only access a maximum of about 4.5 GB of RAM. So every sampler instrument, Drum kit, orchestral library etc you insert in a session is going to take a small piece of the RAM pie until there is no more and then you’ll get the (read opening sentence)

Well that Sux.

Yes it does, but it’s not a new problem. It’s been with us all along and trust me when I say that today, these limitations seem almost minimal compared to where the technology has come from.  What is new however is the A) every computer can now accept a lot more than 4 BG of RAM, and B) the amount of brand new users who have never used a DAW, never used a Sampler, have never been exposed to the inherent limitations of these systems and have been sold a wonderful “yes you can it’s so easy” dream. Which means when reality hits it’s a shocker for most who really have no idea what’s happening ‘under the hood’

Yes Fine, but what can I do?

Someday in the not very far off future applications will become 64bit. What that basically means, in context of this Blog, is that the limitations of memory access are lifted. Native Instruments for example just released a 64 bit version of Kontakt 3.5 which is 64 bit.  Load as much into it as you have RAM for.  But in the meantime, you’ll need to keep an eye on your overhead.  Don’t load 6 instances of EZDrummer, Don’t load the Acoustic Grand Piano into your templates if you don’t play it. In the case of VSL, they created an application that loads the Vienna library into a second application in the background. This means you get 4.5 GB of RAM just for the orchestra library, and still get to keep 4.5 GB of Ram for whatever DAW you are running.  As long as you’ve got 10 or more GB of RAM to begin with it’s a great solution.

As a final caveat, keep in mind that the 4.5 GB limit I mention here does vary from DAW to DAW, It simply a maximum potential and does not necessarily mean 4.5 GB worth of samples. The DAW itself is taking up RAM and that will vary and some applications may max out at a maximum allocation of 4 or less.

It can be so complicated can’t it?

I wish to mix my tracks live into 4 parts- bass, drums, keys and odds & ends and have them running concurrently on 4 Audio tracks live .

We would call these “STEMS” or “GROUPS. Are these “stems” recorded to their OWN tracks or do you want to be able to mix them into “GROUPS” Live?… So that you could make adjustments WITHIN the “groups” or “stems”? IE: All drums would be coming out of a “STEREO PAIR” but, you may want to be able to raise or lower the snare live… For this tutorial I will assume that all your tracks are separate…

I need to learn how to send these out of Cubase 4.5.2…

You will need to create GROUP tracks in Cubase…

PROJECT>ADD TRACK>GROUP CHANNEL…

In the OPTIONS box that appears, choose to create 4 and make them STEREO.

You will now have 4 STEREO GROUP CHANNELS.

NAME each one just like you name an AUDIO TRACK . IE: DRUMS / BASS / KEYS / ODDS&ENDS.

In the MIXER you can now select an output destination for each instrument…

So… You can now set the OUTPUT of each audio track to the appropriate GROUP…

IE: Kick – to DRUMS / Snare – to Drums, Hat – To DRUMS, etc…

Once you have completed the routing, you will have 4 FADERS (The GROUP tracks) that “contain”your different “groups” or “stems” of instruments.IE: 1 fader controls the volume of ALL drums, another fader controls ALL Keysboards, etc. NOTE: They will appear at the extreme RIGHT of the Mixer.

…to an M-Audio Firewire 410 interface , and then route these 4 audio tracks into the mixing desk that I will have on stage.

The FireWire 410 has 8 Line outputs on the back so, you can use these “line outs” in pairs…

IE; 1+2 = Drums / 3+4 = Bass / 5+6 = Keys / 7+8 = Odd & Ends… You would then just connect these

physical output “pairs” to your mixer… Just make sure that the pairs of faders on your mixer are

panned HARD LEFT & RIGHT to maintain the stereo imaging (if there is any).

To ROUTE the AUDIO that is coming from the FADER GROUPS directly to the various outputs

of your FireWire 410 you will need to set some things up in your VST Connections window…

Like this: Open VST Connections…

And you will see this – Make sure you have clicked on the OUTPUTS TAB!!!

Next, click on the ADD BUS button and add 3 Stereo buses.

Then click OK.

You will now see something like this…

Note that EACH pair of stereo outputs is assigned (in the device port column) to outputs 1-8

of MY Device. You should be able to achieve the SAME with your FireWire 410.

Finally, we need to set the OUTPUTS of our newly created GROUP tracks.

Open the mixer, locate the group channels we created earlier and set the outputs like this…

And this…

And this…

And so on.

If everything is set correctly, you will hear your groups out of the separate

pairs of outputs on the back of your FireWire 410.

NOTE: If you are ONLY monitoring the “MAIN” stereo out, you will NOT

hear anything routed to outputs 3-8 until you hook them up to your mixer.

Q: I have a song where we recorded an acoustic guitar first then did the drum tracks later and so on. Before I recorded the drum tracks, I should have fixed the tempo problem first. Can I still fix this problem? (Even after using elastic audio to move some drum hits around?) I don’t work in grid mode or tick base settings for the most part. I know that this needs to change some day. Do you use beat detective?

A: OK, There’s 2 ways I can see going with this.

Way 1) Use Beat Detective to correct specific sections of the song, Say a bad fill for example Beat Detective is good with small sections. and is good for fixing a specific timing problem, but may still not work great if the tempo is all over the place or not defined for the entire song.

Way 2) Go the long way and create a tempo map of the entire song. Allowing you to use Elastic audio on any recorded tracks with more control over changing the actual tempo of the song. This is what I have been doing to fix parts because ultimately everything is much easier to edit in a grid mode once the tempo work is there. Also, Overdubbing new parts might be easier since you’ll be able to use a click track that will correspond to the tempo.

• Perform a SAVE AS at this point, so you can experiment without losing your current place. Creating the Tempo Map involves identifying bars and beats. Start by identifying bar 1. This could be tricky if you have any tracks set to Ticks. You may need to set them back to Samples before Identifying bar 1.
• Next identify Bar 2. This will set the Start tempo of the song. Now create a click track. This will help you by indicating when the tempo is changing and then go through the whole song identifying bars as you go whenever the click track gets off time. Each time you identify a bar, it will adjust the tempo map. Pic 1 shows where the Identify beat command is and also shows you my session, where I’ve gone through and done exactly that. Notice how the Tempo is identified, it’s all over the place. Kicks and snares are good places to identify beat. (Beat Detective can do this too, but I find it very tedious for an entire song)

• 
• Next, Change any Sample based tracks to tick based. Then pick the elastic type for ALL TRACKS - be sure your drum tracks are all grouped. Don’t leave any tracks out because they won’t be adjusted when you change tempo. Then I’ll mess around with the Tempo Operations window.
• In pic 2, I’m selecting 2 bars to apply a tempo change to.

This should go a long way to fixing any tempo issues. I don’t normally quantize things after all this, but often manually adjust or move warp markers using Grid mode. — Hope this helps.

If you want to bring (Import) an MP3 or Audio file into CUBASE and analyze it for learning/teaching or

Simply reusing it for a song or track you are composing – Here is how you do it…

For example, if you want to be able to slow down (tempo wise – without changing the pitch) an audio track so that you can figure out what is being played and examine the arrangement or simply use it as a loop, read on…

Although you could technically do this to an entire song (3 minutes +) it’s better to break the song/track up into separate 4 BAR segments. This is because all of the TEMPO/TIME stretching – compressing capabilities of CUBASE are based on the idea of working with “small” 1-4 Bar loops.

So, the first thing to do is define “LOOPS” or small segments of the song/track for processing.

To start, we will define a 4 bar area or “loop” that we want to examine.

To do this we want to set the LEFT / RIGHT boundary (or the start and end of the loop) markers in Cubase… Remember at this point the TEMPO that is set in Cubase has no relationship to the audio

you have just imported since the DEFAULT tempo of a new project in Cubase is 120 Beats Per Minute or 120 BPM. IE: Cubase has NO idea and does NOT care if the audio you just imported has ANY tempo value of any kind.

NOTE: To set (adjust) the Left and Right “markers” – Set LEFT Marker by holding down the “Ctrl” key

And clicking (and sliding) in the RULER area – Set RIGHT Marker by holding down the “Alt” key and

clicking (and sliding) in the RULER area.

After setting the L & R “Markers we can preview the “LOOP” by clicking on the “LOOP Enable” icon in

The transport bar.

Once we like what we HEAR, we will “split” the “loop” by Right Clicking, Hovering over the “EDIT” category and then choosing “Split Loop” from the sub category of the menu.

Next, we’ll select the area that we just “split”

Now COPY / DRAG this “loop” to a new track… NOTE: whenever you drag a piece of audio –

(or MIDI for that matter) to a “blank” area, Cubase will “Auto-Create” a NEW track for you.

Now, we want to turn what we have identified as our “loop” into a NEW piece of audio.

You will now see this dialog box…

Next, focusing on our new piece of audio or “loop”, we want to figure out what the ACTUAL tempo of this loop is… First, double click on it to open the “SAMPLE EDIT” window.

The Sample Edit Window…

Since we KNOW this “loop” is 4 BARS long, we need to tell Cubase, right here…

After telling Cubase the correct BAR count, it calculates the TEMPO as seen above.

Cubase now tells us that the ACTUAL TEMPO of this 4 bar loop is 104 Beats Per Minute.

The last step before closing the sample edit window is to enable the “PREVIEW”

Button.

After closing the SAMPLE EDIT window, you will notice that the “loop” region

Looks like this…

This indicates that this “loop” or “region” will adjust itself to whatever tempo

You set in the “TEMPO TRACK”…

Let’s open up the TEMPO TRACK window and set the TEMPO…

Like this…

Now we’ll see the BARS and BEATS grid change to the NEW (correct) Tempo!

You can now change the TEMPO TRACK at will and the TEMPO of audio region we worked on will

Change accordingly – Without changing the pitch!

I recently got a call from one our regular clients about some funky-ness while

“Dragging & Dropping” MIDI in Cubase 4. In this case we were using Toontrack’s

EZdrummer. It’s usually very straight forward… You open up the Grooves window in

EZD, find what you want and just drag it over to the MIDI track that is assigned to EZD.

BUT, instead of the “chunk” of MIDI just dropping where we wanted it – It would create a

couple of NEW, UNWANTED tracks. Worse than that, it kept creating new pairs of these

unwanted tracks EVERY TIME we did a Drag and Drop from EZD.

I figured that this HAD to have something to do with a preference in Cubase 4… So, I did

some digging and this is what I figured out…

NEXT…

When you do a MIDI “Drag and Drop, you are essentially IMPORTING MIDI into your

Project so, I had a look at the MIDI Preferences in Cubase 4…

To get to your Preferences, Click on the FILE MENU and then Click on PREFERENCES

As shown here…

NEXT…

What I discovered was right here…

The DEFAULT Setting has these two options (see below) ON!

I’m not quite sure what “Auto Dissolve Format 0″ is or does but,

After much playing around with it, I determined that things are better

With this setting OFF. The next setting is the more obvious one…

“Import To Instrument Tracks”… This one is the real culprit. This

Was creating new instrument tracks EVERY time we did a Drag And Drop.

SO – Shut these two “preferences” OFF and Dragging And Dropping MIDI

In Cubase 4 will act the way you’d expect.

Q: Some friends of mine recorded at a Pro Tools HD studio recently. The studio selected a lower sample rate along w/ using a lot of compression. Why the lower sample rate? Is this common to do?

A: The Short answer is,  to save space and to allow for more DSP processing. The higher sampling rates require twice as much hard drive space, and twice as much CPU processing power.

The Long answer is, it depends.  I’ve run sessions at recording studios  before and I’ve set the Sample Rate to 48k so that when it comes to mixing, I’ll have the ability to apply more plug-in processing. Larger Sample rates may technically sound better, but even with some of today’s best computers, its easy to run out of DSP at the higher sample rates.  Most of the work I do is at 48k.  Deliverables for Television and Motion Picture broadcast are all at 48k. CD’s are all at 44.1k 16 bit.  Mp3s further reduce the amount of info in the audio that is retained.

So the advantages of the higher sample rate for most of today’s work are really limited to the environment its recorded in.  It’s also unclear at this time who can really tell a difference.   There is a much greater jump in quality and dynamics going from 16 bit to 24 bit. That is easy to hear and was a major improvement in digital recording.  But the Jump from 48k to 96k, or even 192k seems to yielded much less of a qualitative improvement.   So to get back to the question, my guess is they felt that 48k or 44.1k would provide them with more DSP for mixing in Pro Tools.  Without talking to the engineer its only a guess.

Another reason is that it takes up half the space on a hard drive. But I do think that for modern rock or electronic music, the lower sampling rate is fine. Just because the rate is lower does not mean quality will suffer. Many many recordings are all done at the lower rates, and the end listener would never know the difference. Good engineering can easily transcend any sample rate.

We’re introducing a new instructional series called CaseBase pulled from our expanding knowledge base. Covering common issues in computer recording. These are all transcripts of technical sessions with OBEDIA members that we hope you find of interest, and may be able to use to improve your own computer recording techniques.

Look for the first one later today!