Deactivate all plugins on drum group

[joe murphy drums]

I have found info on how to bypass all my plugins on my drum group to avoid latency while live tracking but need some help on how to deactivate all the plugins on my drum group with one keyboard command. any help would be much appreciated! thank you JMD

[Benny_Cha_Cha]

If you’re looking to save CPU, the plugins in your drum group (by which I’m assuming you mean an aux track or routing folder) they you will need to deactivate, rather than bypass, all the inserts. I don’t think there’s anyway to deactivate all plugins on a track without using SoundFlow. If you just leave them in bypass, they still use CPU.

If you do want to just bypass all Inserts, it’s Shift-A. There are also commands to bypass just Inserts A-E and F-J, but I can’t recall them right now.


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[Darryl Ramm]

Hi Welcome to DUC.

CTRL-CMD-click on an insert makes it inactive.

You can *bypass* an insert and all those below it in the stack with CTRL-click or bypass all plugins on a select track with Shift-A but there is no equivalent for making part of a stack or all plugins on a track inactive. But there may be other approaches to do what you want. Unlike deactivate bypass does *NOT* remove latency (bypass is intended so you can put the plugin in and out of a mix and hear what it's doing, without wrecking the timing of what is going on). Making a plugin inactive removes the plugin and any latency due to the plugin.

Maybe you can to clue us in to exactly what you found already? Was it the CTRL-CMD-click thing? And a more info about that you are doing will likely help folks give you better advice.

A common approach with drums tracking is to use hardware monitoring, in which case all you need to do is put Pro Tools into low latency monitoring mode to stop it software monitoring and have hardware monitoring set up in your interface.

What interface are you using? I guess not, but sure want to know if you are using TDM or HDX based systems.

Do you really need high latency plugins on the drum tracks in the first place while you are tracking? Or are you recording parts/fixing stuff in an existing mix?

What are these plugins? (hard to know if you are new new to Pro Tools or DAWs or not, but sometimes folks are say picking up plugins that are say super-high latency/look ahead/upsampling limiters, that are really just unsuitable to have anywhere near tracking and you could maybe get what you need with say a much lower latency compressor/limiter plugin (but that's more important if you might want to hear through that while tracking).

You can say set up sends to headphones for tracking with the sends bypassing heavy plugins that are on aux inputs further downstream in the signal flow. If you want to intermix tracking and mixing or just work in a common session template you will likely want to do something like this, and there are many variations of how you might want to do that. Are you using sends for headphone feeds already?

[joe murphy drums]

Thank you Darryl for taking the time to go into detail for me ! I have a template I designed for my drum room and kit that I use when starting a new session. The template has my drum channels / drum aux / master fader all with inserts and aux sends for verbs etc. I will open this template and import any audio(music tracks) I'll be tracking over into the session before I track. I am only using a Clarett + 8 Pre interface/Protools 12/ MacBook Pro 2.9 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7, Slate All Access Bundle Plugins

I usually just manually deactivate each plugin INCLUDING the entire master bus and drum aux but I was looking for a way to deactivate all the plugins on the individual tracks with one keyboard move. I get bad latency while multi tracking the kit if any of the plugins are active. then once I have a keeper drum performance and have done any elastic audio or combining of performances I will reactivate all the plugins , drum aux and master bus and start editing/mixing etc. I do lower my sampling rate quite low while multi tracking btw.

to be clear I multi track the drum kit completely without any inserts or sends I just wanna find a quick way of deactivating them to record and then reactivate once drum takes are finished.

thank you again for you insight

JMD

[Darryl Ramm]

I mostly wanted to point out there is no fast standard way I know of to toggle bulk number of plugins to be inactive. The lack of symmetry there between that and bypassing plugins is interesting and sometimes leads to folks convinced there *must* be a way. You can't do stuff like gang inactive in track groups like you can for bypass. And I didn't want you wasting time chasing that phantom. Benny mentioned using automation with Soundflow... and that could be an option.

I'm not a drummer or somebody who has spent real time tracking drums. So not sure my opinion here is worth much. But what I'd probably aim for is those headphone sends early in the signal flow that get you a good enough headphone mix to track with. Leave all the high latency plugins downstream on a main mix, maybe have all those aux etc. organized in a folder and just make the whole folder inactive. Like it's your music, you are tracking yourself on drums, you likely only need one headphone send, you don't need the main mix while tracking, so you can get this setup pretty simply. But again, that's just me. I hope folks here who track live drums speak up with better advice.

[smurfyou]

What if you duplicated your entire set of drum tracks. Remove all plugins completely from the duplicates. Put those in a basic folder and the original set in a basic folder. Activate/Deactivate the folders depending on whether you're tracking or mixing. Once you're done tracking move the clips to the folder with plugins.

[albee1952]

My solution to this is to put all high-latency plugins in the same slot across all tracks(IOW, my Slate VTM is in slot A on every track). That way, I can "power claw"-click to deactivate everything in slot A across all tracks(and repeat to enable all). For those that don't know "power claw", its holding all 3 modifier keys