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Easy Mixer and Mixer Tab

Lesson 13 from: Superior Drummer Master Class

Rikk Currence

Easy Mixer and Mixer Tab

Lesson 13 from: Superior Drummer Master Class

Rikk Currence

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Lesson Info

13. Easy Mixer and Mixer Tab

Next Lesson: Mixing Presets

Lesson Info

Easy Mixer and Mixer Tab

So let's move on. Let's go back to 1 20 let's come to this last component on the first page that we might actually be done with the first page. You never know. You never know. So this is the easy mixer. Now, the easy mixer is exactly what it sounds like. It is basically taken all of the most important controls from the not so easy mixer. And when I say not so easy, I don't mean because it's difficult. I mean, because there's a lot of options here, but it's taken all the things you might need on a more consistent, more immediate basis and bring them to the front page out of convenience so that you do not have to go to the mixer tab toe work with some basic movements. Okay, so first and foremost again, we know that it needs to be blue if you want to work on it. And the way to check is as you click it, it should be telling you in this description right here, what you're doing right. So now what? You're gonna notice that we haven't really addressed yet because we're not in the mixer mixer ...

page is, as you click on this particular instrument, it's going to give you one of the again, depending on how many channels there are in the mix, and this is showing you all the channels in the mixer. It's going to give you the most common. So right now snare top makes sense were working with the snare top microphone. You have the fader. This fader does directly correspond to the fader in the mixer because this is just the easier version of that mixer again. When you're over here, you're talking about the level of the instrument relative to the performance. It's pre this mixer, so you've got one level of control here. Then you have another level of control here, and this is going to be important as it builds, because there's four levels of control throughout superior drummer. Before you even hit the master fader, which is pretty impressive, and then you get to your dog, you do whatever you want to do, so you have phase where you can adjust phase again. Many awesome recording classes offered by Creativelive. If you're not sure what phases or does, that's like a whole two day thing in and of itself. But you can adjust the phase of this particular channel or any channel in the mixer solo mute. Those do exactly what you think they're going to do. And again, you're only affecting the snare top microphone. You can come down here and there's some time correction that we're gonna talk about in a minute. And then right here, right here. Inserts says none because there are no current inserts in the mixer. So what's an insert in the tune? Tracks appeared over 2.0, mixer. We have built in audio effects that have provided to us by a company called Sin Axis. That makes him really great standard plug ins. Good stuff. So inside on each channel in this mixer, you're gonna have option for e que filter gate. You can just add as many of those are available to you here. We also have some presets. We're gonna talk about that a little bit more as we move to the mixer. But this will let you know if there's anything inserted on that channel. So you're aware of what you're working with. This has the fade. This has the pan, and this has the master bleed. Now this is forcing us into the topic of conversation about the mixer, which is pretty much we're going to get a little ahead of schedule. We won't talk about the mixer for the majority of the next session. So before I move any farther into kind of balancing out the mix and everything else, I want to make sure that we're all on the same page with where we're headed. So far, we've talked about all the ways you can customize the sound of the drums. Is there recorded the configuration in which they're played and the performance based on your method? So whether you're playing live E kidder keyboard, many whatever this entire page has been about getting these things right so that you feel good about it. While we all agree talked about how the memory plays into that, all the things that you want to do with that to make sure that you've maximized period drummer and now as we move into this mixture component, you're going to see that this is where things become much more real world. So if you've had experience and a lot of people have again, you work with your Daw, you've worked. Maybe in a studio. The mixture is exactly what you think it is. It's a digital replication of the channels and the mixing process or channels captured for this particular session. So going to start by saying many instruments and superior drummer have multiple channels assigned to them, just like we see snare top. There's a snare bottom, and then those both bounced out into a bus, and there's a snare compressor bus. So there are a number of things that happen when we get to the mixer that drastically will alter the sound of the audio. Most of what we're doing with here is performance, physical modelling and making sure the drums sound at the sample level the way we want them to sound, what everybody agreed and that the performances are relate in a way that's realistic enough that we feel good. So by the time we get to the mixer again, the mixture isn't gonna be affecting anything other than the pure signal of audio that we're sending to it. And this is where some people get confused because there is a lot that goes on in the mixture is just like any other mixer. It's very complex or some amazing routing. And these features here fade and pan and master bleed. Just these three features alone live in what we call the imaginary software magic world, which is this beautiful place where you can do things to these recordings that could never be done in the real world whatsoever. Follow me. So construct, page, mixer, page grooves, page mapping page bounce will get through. So mapping and balance we're gonna handle tomorrow. But we talked just a little bit this morning about a couple settings for the mixture. I just want to make sure we go over them again. Mono all channels. Now, this is where that would come in. If we had this checked, every stereo channel in the mixture would be presented as a model. So you have the left in the right. Okay, now bounce, stereo splits. We're gonna get to tomorrow. Keep intermediate balance. Record started. Many All of those things have to do with bouncing. We'll talk about them tomorrow as well. We've talked about everything here. No visual hits, force cash mode, default. Classic view. Why anyone would never want that. We don't know because that would be those little squares. We don't want that right force. Linear knobs were all impressed that you can move the now by moving it up and down. It's fantastic. Now, easy mixer, Follow selection. That's a very important option to have checked. If you do not have this checked, this is the last sort of important setting. If that knob is not checked when you select a drum, it will not automatically correspond to what's going on down here. And you will have to choose it manually and again. This could be very confusing for people. So right now, if that was de selected and I chose by highlighting blew the snare drum, this would not be the snare drum. This would be whatever. The last thing I had up, Waas makes sense. So if you want the easy mixer to follow your selections, you simply make sure that that option is checked and you're good to go. Simple enough. Okay, so the mixer page Ah, hush comes over the crowd. Okay? I am using my magic mouse and just sort of scrolling back and forth because there's a lot going on here. So let's start my discussing some very basic components of the mixture. Page number one. Every STX library we record has a different mixture configuration, so there is no one. Set it and forget it sort of mixture mentality. Every studio has a different desk. Every producer uses a different configuration of microphones. Every drum set is a different size. There are so many variables in every recording process that those variables are reflected in the mixer. So we're in again. It's very important if you're following along and you can were in Avatar and we're in the default kit now. What happens when you choose to vary this? So let's go to load, say, priests on Goto combined preset now in the combined presets. We know the tune track provides you a lot of presets, obviously, in The Avatar kid as well. Let's say we wanted the mono funk kit, all right, it's going to give us that combined preset dialogue we talked about earlier, and you're going to see that it has all of these things, including all mixer selected. Now I could de select that and work with this preset in the mixer. Then I have already up. Does that make sense? But I don't want to do that. So I hit. OK, and now we go to the mixer. Pardon me? I just hiccupped on live Internet TV. I go to the mixer and I see that there are all kinds of routing and effects decisions that have been made that are crucial to the sound of this preset. So it's very important that you understand that this is different for every single product we make. Every single 1 may have similar microphone channels, right? Because, okay, let's let's be realistic. Most producers are gonna put a microphone inside the kick drum, so to find a kick drum in Mike in most of the STX is is pretty reliable, right? But let's say we open again. This is Avatar, so there's some pretty cool stuff. So when you look at Avatar, let me go back to the come over hell and go back to the default kit. So I'm gonna go back to the default kit. Awesome. So let's just take a look at the mixer now. This says, out in this says bus, everyone's following me. What the's correspond to are the actual channels, the output channels and the bus channels at the end of the mixer, you can turn those on and off visually so that you don't have to see them. And that's what I'm doing right now. So that gone. It just makes it easier for me to scroll through the instrument selection I have in the mixer. Does everyone follow me so far? When you get over here, you start to see. Okay, so we've got Rack Toms got the overhead and being close Ambient far ambient mid with Ami Amano on Ambien bullets. So there's a bullet like so all these things are described again. You come in here, you gotta avatar, you got a description. Boom. You could kind of get a vibe for what we did. You know, in this particular instance, you can see what's on every channel. It's pretty cool. So if you are an engineer and that's sort of your trade and you're you're using superior drummer, a lot of engineers no, you know, because they work in a lot of please note rooms sound like they know. It might sound like you can almost get an idea of what the drums gonna sound like before you even pull it up. That's one of the advantages of having all this information. OK, so as you go through here, you see that the last microphone is the ambient bullet. Like everything else. Kick in, kick out kick sub is great. Now this is Avatar. Now what happens if I go to roots sticks? Okay, it's gonna pull up this. What kind of channels do we have? Their holy crap. It's a whole different vibe, totally different and being far Ami Mono Decca tree laughed. Deck a tree center, deck a tree, right? There's a chamber. There's a drum trash mike, which is like a drum mic buried in the wall. There are different microphones recorded for this particular session, so it's important to understand that the minute you go into the mixer, where the minute you make any decisions in your construct page, you're affecting how all of these things work. So what am I saying before we get too into the mixer? Let's take our avatar example. Let's say we're in Avatar, and by let's say that, I mean, I go back to it. The default kit. Let's say that we've just spent the past hour going drum by drum building envelopes making sure everything's great adjusting the articulations, making sure everything's great. We've got all of it done and we save it right. It's beautiful. When we open another drum set in another studio with different everything, it's going to be different. So it's very important to realize what you're doing as you go there. This is why the Ekstrom component comes in. What people start talking about mapping and extra ums and building things. There is a lot that can be kind of managed and mitigated through just the right selection. So what I want to make sure everybody understands is again as you make decisions down here and you're like, OK, great. I've got my kick trimming everything set up on the easy mixer. Now you can do this so you can apply the default bus routing. You can round out directly. This has options, obviously, for the Avatar Natural, the natural recording of the Avatar Kit, the way everything was stock, and then easy drummer, which we'll talk about in a minute. You can make presets, but those presets air only applicability within this studio. Does that make sense. It would be like setting the recall on a desk in one studio and then going to another studio. You were never worked like Well, I should be able to recall what you might be able to get the failures in the same place book because of what's there. It's gonna be a completely different sound. That's the beauty of Superior Drummer 2.0 is were literally taking you to different studios as we do all these expansion packs. It's not just about recording more drums. The last thing the world needs is another black beauty snare drum sample. That's the last thing. But what you need is an artist is the option to say, Man, I'm working on a track that's a little more R and B or soul infused. I want to get drums that were recorded at Fame Studios and Muscle Shoals because that's a cool. That's what their sound is. We have that or to say. Like we said earlier, I'm a metal guy. I really tight, punchy, massive drums that we're gonna cut through a wall of guitars. Well, we've got a number of products for that, and it's not about having just the drums. It's about taking that producer to a studio and giving them carte blanche to make sure that you get the best sounds out of that studio. So you have to look at an STX as every time you open one of these, you're literally going to a different recording studio and you're taking all of those things that you're looking for in your sound. You're taking all those things that disappear. Drummer can give you in sound and performance enhancements. You're going okay that worked in Avatar. Let's see if it works in Hit Factory. Let's see if it works in a layer. Let's see if it works in Blackbird or any of the other world class places we go. I don't know if you know this about us. Clearly, we spend a lot of money recording drums, lots tons between the producers, the engineers and the studio as we go to Were the company that I mean, that's that's kind of our thing. We superior drummer When it came out was the first product where was kind of like Oh, Neil Dorfman, rule famous engineer path Raul, world famous producer. This is their baby. This is they're working with us to give you sounds that that's what avatar is that they have hurt. You know, we're talking about a studio that's recorded everything from Keith Richards to Bruce Springsteen and Bon Jovi. Everything like these guys have worked on, ah, cavalcade of things we've all heard. Let's get a look at how they did that. So every single time you go to one of these, just remind yourself you're going to a different studio. And every time you go to one of these your easy exes, you're not only going to a different studio, but you're going to a different studio, where we've done most of the, you know, the design work for you and said this should be a already said, Oh, this is Nashville. This is that national drum sound. You don't have to do anything, just go and pull it up. So it's really a matter of preference. There is no right or wrong. It's. Do you want to design the drum sound in the studio, or do you want us to have it designed for you? And as we'll show you after the break because it's going to get pretty heady, there is a difference when you open an easy drummer session versus appeared on recession in that same studio environment. How things were handled True questions, concerns, comments, questions during taken Let's do it. Are the settings in the Settings page universal or saved to the preset? These are all universal. Okay, so when you enable one of these, it will all be there. You'll have to restart, but and I'll give you that warning. Here. You're changing this, but yeah, So every time I open, for instance, the easy mixer follows my selection because I have a check. This is all universal. So if you check 16 bit or like if you forget, a lot of times you've checked something. It's never a bad idea to go back to the Settings page and just see where everything is that if things air not functioning the way you want to. Yes, uh, does SD to compensate for phase issues when combining instruments from different kids. Sure, and we'll get into that with the mixer. Face is always a good question, and it's always a big obsession with engineer types. Phase is, I will say this is a broad statement, and then after the break, we'll do the kind of the micro phase is always a relative subjective decision made by the engineer recording the instruments and in the real world, in production, there is no perfect everything well, for drums, especially, everything will always be in phase all the time. So how we mitigate and handle that? When you start to combine other drums, we'll talk about that. We get to the next thing, but just know that there is no if there is. If anyone ever presents to you hard and fast truth, if you will, that the everything's always and face it. No, it's not ever. That's just not. There's no straight lines in nature, and nothing is ever in phase all the time in a drum recording, and it will vary again from room to room to room. I give you a perfect example. One person may have their room makes four feet back. One person may have the roommates six feet back, and that phase alignment is going to be present or dis alignment present when you try and combine those two rooms. If that's something you want to do, the fleas come with the dog. What we're not doing is trying to pretend that it's not there and we do give you tools to deal with what you hear. But that's ultimately going to be a subjective decision the end user makes. But I will say, if I conclude our own horn just a little bit when you work with a guy like Randy Stab or you work with a guy like Jeff Balding or Glen Rose and Senior Path Roller Andy Snipper, any one of these world class producers and engineers, they generally tend not to have that very many phase issues in their recordings. They kind of have that part ironed out by the time we get there, which is a beautiful thing about working with guys that do it on a regular basis for a living. Great question, though. How do drum How do drums brought in from different drum kits recorded at different studios? Interact with the rumor ambience? Fader. So is that sort of the same thing? It's similar, and again we're getting ahead of ourselves with the mapping. I love it. Everyone's getting excited. We're not going to tell you exactly how it works till tomorrow morning, but the reality is is it can work, and again it's relative to the way that you sound. So let me I'll say this. Were we never there in superior to Point? All right now there is no accommodation or we would call like a corrective room impulse or I R. So, for instance, we did not create or manufacture fake ambience for any of our drums. We're not saying, OK, here's this neutral space where you can bring in all these things recorded in different places, and they all sound like they were in the same room. That's not what's appear Drummer does. If you're going to bring in drums from other studios into your session, we're only allowing you to do it because you want to. We're not guaranteeing you. It's going to sound great. We're not even encouraging you to do it. And there's a we have a process that we've mitigated for that. But we are telling you that you certainly can do it. And there are some gonna be some challenges. There's no doubt sometimes depending on what you're trying to do, but ultimately phase the way we bring the relation of drums not recorded in the same studio at the same time. All an end users preference and decision. You can decide if it's on. And, you know, we've heard some. Amazingly like, Wow, we have never heard that type of results and we've heard some holy crap, Please, You never play that again because my ears hurt type of results. So cool A lot of questions about this one. Similar questions. A superior drummers, an awesome product, though at times it can be overwhelming to find the right groove. He's a drummer to Has the Beat Finder feature any plans to get something like that? An SD to, uh, to make finding grooves easier? Are there plans to implement some of these drummer to functions and features in the spirit? Two point? Oh, it's a great question that I don't have an answer to. I can't see why at some point time it may not make its way in there. At the moment, there is no no other function or feature. When we go through the grooves, Page again will come back as we do the mix in the grooves. Hopefully, we'll try and cut some of the short cuts down, but right now, easy drummer to does have sort of the for lack of about from easiest the most definitive way to find these things in real time. So at the moment, you're kind of stuck with the traditional browsing through the grooves component. Unless you've again got both programs and you admitted through and you're using all the song writing functions Visa Drummer to with Sound set of Superior to and that's that's at the time of this taping. So who knows what the next next? 4567 12 35 42 months? Well, who knows? So this would probably be a topic that will be addressed later in ah, class, however, to track used to have a drum sample replacement program product called Drone Tracker instead of using another company sample replacements offer. Is there any plans to release a newer version of Germ tracker? Create a new tune track software that integrates with SC two? How can you say hands? So I have to answer all these questions that these air phenomenal questions, and I'm glad that people are asking. There's always plans to make everything we've made better and excel in everything we've done way. We're we're hearing you about drum Tracker. For those of you that don't know we did have ah, drum replacement program that ultimately would allow you to take recorded drum audio and sort of spit out midi that you could use to replace that that drums have called drum tracker. And there were a number of reasons that, unfortunately, we sort of abandoned the platform and one of those because we're own worst enemy and critic. When it comes to making things better, so will there be, ah, future drum replacement software program from the number one drum production company in the world, but not a betting man. I'm just saying you never know. I'm just saying is all. I'm saying You'll see it when you see it. If you see it, how's that? Does that work that good works Any other questions? No, I think we're good. Okay, keep cruising. All right. So again, we're in the mixer and just so people aren't freaking out thinking they're mixer's broken. I have the buses and the outputs turned off. So if I turn those back on and you scroll through, you'll see that you have buses. If you don't know what a bus is, I'll give you a brief explanation, although you should probably watch another class, and the outputs are going to correspond to the multi output functionality of Superior Germer. Two point. Oh, so let's start with buses. So a bus in the simplest way I remembered it as a younger man. A mentor of mine described the buses. Lots of people get on the bus and go somewhere. It's really simple. I mean, it sounds like a childish analogy, but it's actually very true. You could take lots of signals from different places. Lots of people route them all to this bus, the elegant on the bus. And then that one vehicle takes all those sounds somewhere. So what is bussing used for? Whatever you want, you could bus all of the kick drum microphones toe one busted in effect that you could. You could bust the kick from the Hyatt in the snared Oh, and you could. It's whatever you want to do as a sound designer or engineer you can do. There's no right or wrong, and you have that capability inside of the superior 2. mixer. So why that's significant is because it gives you a level of flexibility prior to going to your Daw that a lot of other particular software components like ours don't have, so you can literally start to really dial in a custom mix. And as you will see, if you work with any of our producer preset packs or actually any of the combined presets that we have that have been saved by people, you can see that when you load stuff. Ah, lot of people use the buses. Right? So we here, we've loaded the elegant now return. You see what we've got this Tom's bus here and we've got, ah, snare bus, and they're all affected. So the bus not only takes all of your signals through one channel, so you can affect them as a group, but you still have the original channel that they came from going down its own individual output to show what you basically have is, for instance, one of the most common things people do is they'll bus a snare drum, and what they'll do is they'll send all the snare drum likes to one bus, and then they'll affect that bus to create a really punchy, big bright snare drum, and they'll layer those two things together. You can do that inside the software before you go out to your dog, which we're gonna show you obviously, tomorrow as we get a little bit deeper into routing and mixing So you have a lot of options. There are a lot of things that come into play before you even think about going outside to affect things and what we'll call the rial doll world. And then you have your outputs. So if we and we're not right now, right now, as you can see, you are right Here are outputs, right? Kicks near, kicks in your hats, hats. That's high hat. If we wanted to change this, we could. Everything is routed to our standard output. We're not in a situation right now inside solo where we could use the multi channel outs. We have one pair of outputs, their stereo. So everything we do is going through those two that right and left channel like a master fader and coming out. That's the way solo is set up. If we wanted to, we could enable an individual output for every channel to match up or route into the channels in our dog. And that way you can have control over the actual affecting of the drums and sort of the channels here within the mixer, as well as have additional control in your dog, giving you all kinds of options again. Once you come out of the Superior Drummer software, you're not limited to the tools and resource is that we make available. Even though there's a tone of stuff in here. There's all sorts of other plug ins and all sorts of other sound design and shifting tools you can use inside your daughter. Effect what you've already done here. It's pretty cool. So these two buttons ultimately are just turning the visual component of your buses and your outputs off so that you can get to the instruments quicker. We just found that a lot of people end up, you know, what's this? They scrawl away, down. They get sort of lost, and the mixer, as you can see, has a lot of features and a lot of text written into and available to it. So we want to just make sure that you have options to get the things quickly and again. That's also why we have the easy mixer component on this outside, so ah, lot of people come into the mixture and they panic like, ah, who? And it looks a lot worse than it is. They're just not used to working with the Channel Strip or that sort of format. Whereas on this page again, you can see that we've got okay, some on the kicking. We've got a compressor. There's no, uh, what we have here the time correction. We don't have any of that Going on with a master bleeds all the way up. We haven't messed with anything yet. And again, as we change, it goes through and shows us all of these different components. So this mixer again is a direct correlation to and will absolutely work with this mixer. Those two things affect one another. So volume moves, you know, here will come here. Mixer body moves. It's the same. Okay. And that is again something to delineate between the instrument. Whereas volume move noticed. No value move. So this is your performance. This is your actual audio output were good, solid so far. All right,

Ratings and Reviews

Shayne Sheldon
 

I am very pleased with this course. It was originally presented as a free live stream and is the first CreativeLive course that I have taken in. I am so impressed, that I have purchased it. If you are a current Toontrack Superior Drummer 2 user (or are thinking of buying SD 2) and are looking for a guided way to learning this software, this course is one of the best learning methods I have ever come across. I doesn't matter what your experience level is with Superior Drummer-- there is something here for beginners, intermediate, and advanced. Though I would recommend having a working knowledge of MIDI, audio and computers. Absolute beginners to using software instruments and creating music in their computer might find the information in this course a bit overwhelming. Instructor Rikk Currence takes you thoroughly through basic to advanced concepts showing the true depth of this virtual instrument program. Rikk takes you through the program settings and options; creating custom virtual drum kits; settings for MIDI controllers and E-Drum kits; using the SD 2.0 as a stand alone virtual instrument, as well runninf it as a plug-in in a Digital Audio Workstation (D.A.W.) like Avid's Pro Tools. So much more is covered in this course, that I can't fully begin to share it all in this review. The knowledge I gained from this CreativeLive two day course has given me extra insight, increasing my functionality with Superior Drummer 2. Two thumbs up for this Master Class-- I can't recommend it enough to all Superior Drummer 2 users Thanks to Rikk Currence and CreativeLive for a superior course on Toontrack's Superior Drummer 2.

Ian Stephenson
 

Great course, the tutor kept it entertaining and held our interest whilst still getting over a huge wealth of detail for all levels of user. recommended :-)

Marcus
 

Killer class! Well worth purchasing. Each lesson is effectively thorough, as well as comfortably paced. And Rikk’s sense of humor makes the learning process all the more enjoyable.

Student Work

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