Reaper DAW 101 Part 7:- VSTi Drum Routing (Slate Drums 5, MT Power Kit etc)

hello everybody Adam Steele from hot Pole Studios here and today we're carrying on the reaper tutorial series it's quite a specific video today we talked about routing in a previous video which was to do sending one particular sound to another place to do with sends and all that kind of thing today we're talking specifically about virtual drums this does also apply to certain keyboard since style plugins that have got multiple outputs and how to use them or we're going to talk specifically about how to get say a drum kit that's a stereo drum kit and split that out into a separate kick drum separate snare drum separate toms all that kind of stuff separately on separate channels so you can process it how you like with your own compressors eq's reverbs all that kind of stuff and then how to combine that back into something stereo at the end so that then you've got all the possibilities to work with [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so today we're going to be looking at using two different virtual drum plugins firstly we're going to use the free 1mt power drum kit which we used in a previous video the one specifically about routing and then we're going to use Steven slate drums because I'm a big fan of Steven slate drums five I used four as well but there is also a free version of Steven slate drums five so if this really works for you you don't necessarily have to shell out the money father the big version although I would wholeheartedly recommend that you do it's very budget dependent of course you've got to appreciate that not everybody's got the money to throw out that kind of thing so before we look at anything let's go back to our project that we've been using on everything and this time I have made a drum loop in MIDI and that's gonna go over and over and over and it's really relatively simple but I've made sure I've thrown in high hats right Tom's just at different points it's really simple the drum beats have a quick listen to this and that's just gonna loop over and over and over it's the same thing repeated so there's no point playing you anymore of that because you will very quickly go insane yes so if we look at our mixer window which is down here somewhere and I hit play that comes out off drums but as it stands it's coming out as a stereo audio but we don't have access to the separate kick snare toms all that kind of stuff and what we want to do is separate that out now for this you need a few things you need a plug in whether it's a drum plug-in or another synth plug in something like contact by Native Instruments there's a really good example of this you need a plug-in that is capable of outputting audio on many different channels you also need to look at the channel routing matrix for that particular channel and then you also need to use the mixer in Reaper so you need a plug-in that can send out lots of separate sounds a way to distribute those sounds and somewhere in Reaper to pick those sounds back up and then use them separately now before we go any further I should definitely try and make this clear there's a long way of doing this which I'm going to do first so that you understand exactly how this works and how it's happening pi scenes and then there is a short cut but the short cut I'll show you second you'll probably end up using the short cut more often than not but if you don't understand how the long version works then you can run into problems further down the line so I highly recommend you watch all of this video to understand how this is happening so that then when you use the short cut if anything's not quite how you would like it you know how to change it or how to trace where audio has gone so we're going to use empty power kit for the long way and the first thing we need to do we can see we've got our drums in empty power kit if we hit them there they'll work of course and if we open up the mixer window in empty power drum kit and this could be anywhere for different brands for something like BFD or addictive drums or that kind of thing they're all in different places but consult the manual for your particular software if you're not using this specific one open up your mixer and you will find that you've got things like separate volumes and it's nice that we can change the separate volumes inside the plug-in and there is even a compressor in empty power kit which is nice with a slider knob on that but that's all the control you have you can't use your own compressors you can't use your own eq's per drum you can't use distortions whatever it is that you would want to use but what you can do is at the bottom it says out one so right now every single channel is coming out of output one these are all stereo outputs in the case of empty power drum kits some of these plugins can give you mono outputs which can be quite useful for something like a single drum but the whole point here is by default everything comes out of channels one and two which is output one that stereo kind of output which means that you hear everything by default and for most intents and purposes that keeps it simple and that's what a lot of people want now for us we want to split that out so the first thing that we'd probably want to do is start to output so let's say we want the kick to come out of output one great so the snare we want to come out separately out of output two so we want to click output two for both of those snare channels let's say that we want the hi-hat to come out output three so that we've got a separate channel for that let us say the Tom's are coming up output for the ride and bail from output five for the ride cymbal and then the crash is in the China out of output six now it looks like the way the empty power kit is set up it doesn't have separate overhead microphones or ambient microphones it just has separate symbol microphones which is different to some other plugins and how they work personally I prefer to have overhead mics and ambient mics room microphones as separate channels or in this case it doesn't really matter this is just to demonstrate this point so now we've routed all those out if I hit play I know what we're going to hear can you guess what we're going to hear before I hit play so while we're hearing now is the kick drum and that's because the kick drum is the only thing coming out of output 1 output one being the one that we hear by default so the next thing that we need to do is we need to go in to our button up here where it says 2/16 out so I'm just going to close it for a second just so it show you two 5/16 out what that means and this comes up for every plugin in Reaper there are two numbers up there so the number of out is the number so the two here is the number of outputs that we are currently using the number that we are telling Reaper to distribute and the 16 is the number that this plugin is capable of at maximum so sometimes you'll see two two out sometimes you'll see eight 16 even 64 I've seen contact two it's 64 possible outputs now that's a lot of outputs and that's crazy but if I click on this it brings in this plug-in pin connector and we can see that out of these 16 channels the first two are going out to one and two which means that that's going to the left and the right of that stereo now if I click this tiny little plus button this'll add some more nor output channels and now we can see that channel 1 is coming out of its stereos but channel 2 is coming out of 3 and 4 so we still won't hear those if we hit play but we can now see at the top it says 416 out because four of them are assigned so if we keep doing this and keep doing it and keep doing it as it goes the way that we've decided to do things we only need to assign 12 of these because we've only gone up to output 6 if I decided to assign this slightly differently so that the last ones come came out of 7 & 8 then we would need all 16 channels because each out in Mt drumkit anti-power kit is a stereo set so that's why it's a little confusing is that output 1 is stereo so that's one two channels output 2 is stereo so that's three four channels output 3 is stereo so it's five six channels and so on and so on and so on so hopefully that's cleared up that confusion but we've now assigned 12 out of these 16 possible channels to go out of 12 separate outputs if I hit play we're still only going to hear the kick drum so the next thing we need to do is we need more tracks in the reaper mixer window to receive this audio so that they've got something coming in that we can work with so we've got our start which is that the plugins sending stuff out we've got our middle part which is that everything's being sent out of different channels now we need to pick those up somehow so where it says drums here actually what I'm going to do is I'm going to make 1 2 3 4 5 6 channels and the next thing I'm gonna do right so even though we can hear the kick drum I don't want to be using this channel to affect the kick drum because what this could do is this could cause problems where if I move the volume fader on here that could affect everything else so just to be sure I'm going to make a separate channel for the kick drum just so that you're all aware now so on the routing for this drum channel I've made new channels here I've made six new channels so in the routing window for the drums I'm going to untape the master send so that that kick drum channel isn't going out anywhere either because that way when I hit play now we'll see all the MIDI go and we'll see all those levels going out you see these really thin spikes now those are all the separate channels we can see the separate drums and the separate cymbals making sound we just can't hear them because they're not being told to come back out into channels that come in out the stereo master so this is where Sens come in so firstly you know what I'm gonna before we do these Sens I'm gonna interrupt myself and just for peace of mind these new tracks I'm going to name them before we do anything so that we've got some clarity so I'm going to name the kick snare that's Tom's ride cymbals that way when we start using send we know exactly where things are supposed to be going so back to the routing window and let's just make this further up the screen because this is going to get quite big so I'm going to add a new send to channel for kick and that's going to be audio one and two are going to audio one and two the new channel if I hit play we hear the kick again and more importantly we see the kick moving on the cake if I had a new send which is the snare but then I change the output audio from stereo source three and four which is output two if you remember in mt power kit then hit play I just move this so you can see the kick in the snare channels so you can see that snare channel going now so if I just repeat the process add another send to the hats that's audio stereo sauce five and six and then repeat with the Tom's which is audio stereo so seven and eight ride would then be go down here nine and ten and then last but certainly not least we've got the cymbals which is coming out through eleven twelve so that was quite long-winded or we can see now how if I hit close up rooting down so we can save them and hit play watch all these channels now dance [Music] and so the thing is everything now sounds exactly like it did before when it was all coming out of the same channels so you think well what was the point but now let's just say the snare I can load up an EQ on the snare now and EQ that as a 1 I can use any external plugins anything I can then send some of this to my the reverb channel okay so that was a little gratuitous but if I unsolo the snare and that's now giving me the option of doing that on every separate drum and if we add overheads and ambient mics we could then process them as if we had all these separate microphones available to us on a real drum kit and this is really the way that I prefer to work so if I you can see on the mixer window or just if I right-click on this and show multiple roles so you can see how all the different sends here from the drums are going to their own separate channels and the reason that I untaped must descend on those drums is so that we're not getting a kick drum coming through twice because the original channels 1 & 2 was still alive for that and like I said I can now leave that channel well alone apart from maybe adding more MIDI drums to it either by programming or by recording them in using a MIDI drum kit which I covered in an earlier part of the series or we can then have everything as we like and just to finish this off if I now make a channel here and call it drum group if I close down the mixer window and all these plug-in windows you can probably see if I just minimize everything a little how everything's now come up is separate channels if I click and drag all of them upwards a little that becomes a drum group folder and the drum group folder has all the audio for all those drum channels coming through it [Music] so I can do things like I can heavily compress all the drums while still having the ability to do things like EQ separate drums so if I bring up virtual mix rack ofg stress you'll do nicely nuke mode [Music] a little extreme of course but that hopefully gives you the idea that you now have the freedom by doing things this way to expand the drums out into their separate relevant channels to process as you wish to then bring back into a drum group to them process everything that you've already done together so then you've got this three-stage thing of the the plug-in that makes the noise being split out into the separate channels as if it was a real drum kit then brought back into a bus group to process all together and that's a very professional way of working okay so it's time to show you a slightly quicker way of doing things it's not massively massively quicker but it is a big time saver if you do this a lot and that is so I first things first I've changed from anti-power get to Steven slight drums now this is the full version but if you're using the free version you can do this as well there are just a much more limited number of drum kits so if I open this up load myself up a drum kit as I have done and this is on a singular track that is just mono right now stereo not mono do apologize just a single stereo track derp now the first thing I want to do is go into the mixer I'll pop out because this screen is quite small now fun fact if you were using superior drummer there's a button where it says out one stereo here there just says multi-channel and that's a nice quick shortcut to changing them all to be like kick snare toms everything well that's still only one part of the puzzle so we're quickly going to go kicks out one snares out of two it's a nice little shortcut here actually if I control click more than one I can then change them all in one go so I can go output for for the house so then I can have all these coming out of five cymbal mics six for overheads and seven for that room and eight for that room so that's one part done now if I put this back in so we can see down the bottom here all the routing is done for that first stage the rest of it we see for Stephens like drums as two of 48 outs that would take forever to do but if we click on where it says SSD sampler five we can go to options and build multi-channel routing for output of selected effects I'll click that says are you sure it's gonna make loads and loads and loads of tracks for me I hit yes and that does that routing and if we look at our mixer it's named them all and it's done them all for us which is really rather nice so there's all these tracks I mean the way that I've decided to use them I'm never gonna use all of them but if I hit play now I can see that the routing comes out of all these outputs all the way up to eight and then if I've got more than I need and it's overkill all I have to do is select the one from output nine so I don't need go all the way to the end of the ones I don't need shift and click and then delete them yes and that won't affect the ones I do need so now when I hit play they're already pre routed for me so all I had to do is go into the SSD program tell you to drum where I wanted it to go and then build my multi-channel routing with that nice little but nerve it takes a lot of time out of it I hope you found this video useful it's certainly something that saved me a lot of time over the years hopefully passing that on to you is worth it for you the next video is going to be one that sounds a bit boring in a bit dry but it's actually quite important and that's about backing things up not necessarily just having a separate hard drive and copying all you work that's fairly obvious I mean we all should do that even those of us that kind of don't really get round to it but there are other things you can do in Reaper to do with Auto saves time saves incremental backups actually having audio record to two separate places at once so that you can't lose the file and if one hard drive blows up you've still got another one you know sometimes the audio that you record is too important to lose so that's the next part of this video series and stick around for that thanks for watching so far I'll see you guys in the next video thanks to all our patrons on patreon for supporting us to do these kind of things really really genuinely helps thanks guys see you soon thanks for watching guys if you enjoyed this feel free to check out our other videos as you can find here or check out our Facebook and Twitter or our patreon page which helps us to make more videos like this thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: Hop Pole Studios

Views: 56,319

Rating: 4.9438286 out of 5

Keywords: reaper daw, steven slate drums, ssd5, routing, mt power kit, free vsti, drum mixing

Id: 30s6-cCuysY

Length: 23min 39sec (1419 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 13 2019