drum/midi tracks?

[Intelli-Shred]

Ok, here's a question.. as far as adjustability and tweakability of individual drums.. would it be a bad idea to do individual tracks for each drum and cymbal/percussion instrument in GP?.. I'm thinking while a bit more involved.. I'd be able to drop each individual track of midi into EZ and the ProTools and that would give me a ton of flexibility as far as reverbs, gates and etc.. in editing and choosing individual drums and such? I guess I'd need to find out how many different time I could run the EZ/DKFH to separate tracks.. and thoughts or ideas on this?

[albee1952]

I'm a bit confused on your question, so let me lay out what works for me. I use ezdrummer, SD2 and Addictive Drums(on sale at GC for $99 right now). They get used on a stereo instrument track. All 3 plugins allow you to assign sounds to separate "outputs". Once those selections are made within the plugin mixer, you can add AUX tracks and treat each sound the way you want. You could also use the same routing to feed AUDIO tracks and record the audio(handy if you want to transfer the session to some other studio or computer that may not have the same plugin). Of the 3 plugins, ezdrummer is somewhat limited with a total of 8 "tracks". They are all stereo so you would use stereo AUX or AUDIO tracks and I usually left all the toms on the same track. Addictive drums allows for mono so you can split all the toms out to their own track.

BTW, with ezdrummer, I often found I had too much snare in the overhead track. The solution is to record the drums to separate audio tracks. Go back and re-record the overhead track, but open the plugin and change the snare selection to none. That gets you an overhead track with no snare bleed at all. While that's not "natural", it does give you much better control over the mix

[Intelli-Shred]

I like that idea about having the overhead on a separate track.. I'll try and clear up my original question..
I write some of my drum parts in Guitar Pro and then import the midi into EZ/DKFH.. my question is this: If I wrote each drum and cymbal as a separate track in Guitar Pro and then brought those in one at a time into ProTools via EZ/DKFH and assigned each to a separate track; wouldn't that give me more options in tweaking the mix and the sound and/or effects for the drums?

[albee1952]

I think I am getting the picture now. In theory, you can do a few options. 1 would be to use a separate midi track as you described and assign them all to the ezdrummer plugin on an instrument track. You could also merge all the midi onto the instrument track by selecting midi on any/all midi tracks>copy>click to the instrument track and paste special and merge. Personally, all that seems like a huge PITA as compared to simply writing the midi drums directly on the instrument track. Old habits are tough to break, but you might find a much more streamlined work flow by trying a new process

BTW, using a pad device would allow you to simply tap in midi parts directly to the track. Using Midi-Merge would allow you to record a pass and tap in the hat/ride. Do another pass to tap in kick/snare. Etc.

Maybe search youtube for some tutorials on programming drum tracks with ezdrummer and see how others are doing it for more ideas(and maybe better ideas than mine)

[Intelli-Shred]

Found this.. made it seem pretty simple to pull off; thought I'd share:

http://youtu.be/U33Qf6uVnPM